Homeless in Arizona

Spending $20,000 an hour to kill barefoot guys on motor scooters in Afghanistan.

That's military talk to justify why America needs the worlds most powerful military force!!!!

I guess it really is a jobs program for generals, in addition to being a government welfare program for the corporations in the military industrial complex.

Source

Jets Are Crucial to Afghan War, Until a U.S. Exit

By C. J. CHIVERS

Published: July 6, 2012 54 Comments

Death stopped Abdul Qayum, a Taliban commander in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, in a fiery flash and roar.

It was an evening in October last year, and Mr. Qayum was meeting several Afghans in a field. Though he did not know it, a Navy F/A-18 strike fighter was circling high overhead more than five miles away, summoned by an American Special Operations team. Its engines were out of earshot, the pilot said, “so we didn’t burn the target.”

Mr. Qayum led a platoon-size Taliban group and was plotting to bomb an Afghan government office, an American intelligence officer said. Under Western rules guiding the use of deadly force, the pilot was barred from trying to kill him while he stood in a group of unidentified men.

Then came a chance. The meeting ended, and Mr. Qayum approached a man who had pulled up on a motorcycle, the pilot and the intelligence officer said. Soon the two men were riding together on a dirt road, illuminated on the screen of the aircraft’s targeting sensor.

The pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Brian Kesselring, released an AGM-65E laser-guided missile. Visible on a video recording declassified and released to The New York Times, the missile struck the pair head-on, exploding with such energy that only fragments of Mr. Qayum’s remains were found.

The killing of Mr. Qayum and his driver, confirmed by the Taliban and reviewed by The New York Times as part of an examination of operations in Afghanistan by 44 F/A-18s from the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, was a demonstration of the extraordinary technical and tactical abilities of American air power. For both better and worse, that power has become a defining facet of the Afghan conflict and the American way of waging war.

But the tight integration and expense of air missions, which in Navy crews’ case can cost up to $20,000 an hour, also raise questions about the prospects for the continuing fight against the Taliban.

Weary of the costs of a long war, Western military forces have already begun withdrawing and handing greater security responsibility to Afghan forces. One worry, several officers said, is that these air operations have become essential, necessary for ground units that are operating in contested areas of Afghanistan and hoping to maintain influence, or even survive. And the Afghan government has nothing to match the role they play.

Drawing from the experiences of more than a decade of fighting, and after repeatedly refining training and rules of engagement to address concerns about civilian casualties, aircrews work in close coordination with ground controllers more fully, and usually more precisely, than ever before.

In carefully choreographed killings of tactical commanders like Mr. Qayum, use of heavier ordnance to beat back Taliban attacks, and efforts to keep roads clear of improvised fertilizer bombs, conventional American warplanes are integrated into the finest details of ground war. These missions, distinct from the C.I.A.-run drone program, have allowed a relatively small Western combat force, with just tens of thousands of troops actually patrolling each day, to wage war across a sprawling nation of 30 million people.

The tactics for air-to-ground war have greatly evolved since the war’s start in 2001. One pilot, saying that he dropped just a single 1,000-pound bomb during a six-month deployment, recalled that at the war’s outset, planes would take off with more bombs than they were allowed to return with for landings. “When this kicked off, they were launching aircraft with unrecoverable loads,” said the pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Peter Morgan. “Basically, you had to drop. That’s all changed.”

A Sophisticated Balance

F/A-18 strike fighters are among the world’s most advanced military aircraft, with a price of roughly $100 million each and operating costs estimated at $18,000 to $20,000 per flight hour. Their sorties from the Stennis, each often lasting eight hours round-trip, almost always passed without violence.

Part of this was the nature of an experienced foe. The Taliban have spent years learning to mask their movements and intentions from aircraft, making themselves hard to spot.

Another part was the nature of the rules. Even when Taliban fighters were visible, Western military restrictions devised to prevent harm to civilians and minimize damage to infrastructure, codified after prominent and deadly mistakes that fueled Afghan public outrage, sometimes limited a pilot’s options. Just last month, commanders again tightened the rules for use of air power in civilian areas, after Afghans said a NATO airstrike killed 18 civilians in an eastern village.

In all, Navy pilots released missiles or bombs, or fired their aircrafts’ 20-millimeter cannon, on 41 of the 892 F/A-18 sorties from the Stennis to Afghanistan in late 2011 and early 2012, the carrier air group’s data shows.

This roughly aligns with the use of air power in the recent war. In 2011, for example, the data shows that NATO fixed-wing aircraft dropped ordnance or strafed on 5.8 percent of 34,286 combat sorties flown.

None of the air-to-ground attacks from the carrier stirred up allegations of causing civilian or friendly casualties, which, statistically, have been rare over all.

For the pilots, who live far from the infantry soldier’s daily physical grind and away from the dread of hidden improvised bombs, these strikes and strafing runs hit a personally satisfying chord. They know they are protecting fellow service members and punishing those trying to kill them.

Lieutenant Commander Kesselring said as much after killing the men on the motorbike. That flight was a welcome contrast to the bad days on job, he said, because often “you arrive to a smoking hole and guys calling for a medevac, and you feel pretty helpless.”

Still, the current practices and sophisticated equipment were not flawless. On a few occasions the strikes missed. On another, a 500-pound bomb appeared to break apart upon hitting the ground and failed to explode.

Once a suspected Afghan bomb maker heard the approaching aircraft and sprinted madly for a dirt wall, narrowly eluding a strafe as the rounds struck nearby. The blast wave from a heavier bomb most surely would have killed him, officers said, though it would have put other villagers and their homes at greater risk.

On other days the pilots and the controllers on the ground were not entirely sure of what was happening in a fast-moving firefight. In these cases officers held fire in favor of restraint or nonlethal displays of presence and power.

Although these were the sorts of decisions that some American ground troops have generally resented, American officers say caution and proportionality are essential to maintain support both in Afghanistan and the United States.

A senior Marine officer with command experience in Afghanistan said troops on the ground needed to be wary of impulses to “swat flies with hammers” and risk having airstrikes create more problems then they solve.

Then there were days when all of the elements for a strike or gun run came together, and the nature of the campaign’s air-to-ground violence emerged. Often these were made when ground troops were imperiled, a few times when the situation was grave.

Pushing the Taliban Back

One use of force was on Nov. 10, not long after nightfall in Kandahar Province. Two F/A-18s patrolling over the steppe were told by a ground controller that a combat outpost crowded with Afghan National Army soldiers was under attack.

From the air, the pilots in each aircraft, Lt. Travis Hartman and Lt. Paul Oyler, could see the gunfight on the infrared targeting sensors in their cockpits. They could also sense the confusion. Three Afghan outposts were soon under simultaneous fire, and a sole American ground controller, who was at a fourth post, was trying to gather information by radio and relay instructions to the fighter jets.

“It was the biggest firefight I had ever seen,” Lieutenant Oyler said. “For the next two and a half hours we were overhead and doing our best to track it.”

The Taliban, the pilots said, were under trees and in gullies. The Afghan soldiers could not fight back effectively, and seemed to fire sporadically and erratically. At one point, Taliban fighters had almost reached the walls of one outpost, which was in danger of being breached. “They were in an east-west running tree line, and were basically using that as cover and concealment to move close,” Lieutenant Hartman said. “I’d say they were within 50 meters.”

Two more F/A-18s showed up from the Stennis. Under older rules, the pilots would probably have been cleared to drop a series of bombs, at least several hundred pounds of weaponry. But with the situation not fully clear, the pilots said, and without a ground controller on scene to direct it with care, the aircraft held back their heavy weapons. “A bomb?” Lieutenant Oyler said. “We wouldn’t know where to put it.”

Instead, the pilots were cleared to strafe near the most imperiled outpost with their cannons — each F/A-18 has a large, electrically powered Gatling-style gun in its nose that shoots 20-millimeter rounds.

Lieutenant Oyler and Lieutenant Hartman strafed; then two other F/A-18s strafed, too. Each strafe was roughly 150 to 200 rounds. “We basically worked it in sections, from west to east, and cleared the whole thing,” Lieutenant Hartman said. As the F/A-18s ran low on fuel, a pair of A-10 ground-attack jets arrived to take over, and the Navy pilots headed for a tanker.

The attacks subsided. The outposts held — without the risks of dropping heavier ordnance into the confusion and darkness.

Split-Second Calibration

Similar confusion greeted Lt. Cmdr. Thomas E. Hoyt when Marines called him for help in Helmand Province last October. A Navy medical corpsman had been shot through the left arm in a complex ambush, and Taliban gunmen were still firing from several directions, preventing most of the patrol from reaching the wounded man.

“He and two other Marines were cut off from the others,” said Capt. Michael J. Van Wyk, a Marine pilot serving on the ground as a forward air controller and who was pinned down by a Taliban sniper in another part of the patrol.

Upon arriving overhead, Lieutenant Commander Hoyt did not like what he heard and saw. Captain Van Wyk, he said, asked him to drop a 500-pound bomb on one of the buildings that the Marines were taking fire from. The situation was what was known as “danger close,” with Marines right beside the area to be hit.

The Marines said that the nearest friendly forces were 100 yards away. Lieutenant Commander Hoyt’s view told him the distance was shorter — the two sides were almost intermingled.

He offered his targeting sensor’s infrared video feed to Captain Van Wyk, accessible via a laptoplike device known as a Rover. This would allow the Marines to see what Lieutenant Commander Hoyt saw, to be certain he was looking at the right place before he strafed or released a bomb.

The patrol had been out already 12 hours; Captain Van Wyk’s Rover battery had just died.

To buy time and to get oriented, Lieutenant Commander Hoyt descended for a pass 500 feet over the firefight at about 550 miles per hour, a maneuver known as a “show of force” intended to intimidate Taliban fighters. As he roared by, he released a flare over the building to mark it. Captain Van Wyk confirmed he was looking at the right place.

Lieutenant Commander Hoyt made two more shows of force. But the Taliban fighters stayed put and kept firing. Marines on the ground fired a purple, a green and a yellow smoke grenade to mark where the Taliban fighters were hidden. The pilot’s confidence rose. “As soon as we confirmed where we can and can’t hit, then we could start shooting,” he said. “There were friendlies all over the place.”

Lieutenant Commander Hoyt suggested strafing instead of releasing a 500-pound bomb, and the controller agreed. The F/A-18 then made two passes, firing 460 rounds — one long burst into a canal, the other into a courtyard next to the building where the Marines had first asked for a bomb.

Part of the firefight started to subside, allowing Captain Van Wyk and the Marines to plan a landing zone for a helicopter to evacuate the wounded medic. A pair of Super Cobra attack helicopters showed up, freeing the F/A-18 to climb back to elevation.

The fight lasted perhaps another hour, and the corpsman was evacuated before its end. “Air power kept Marines from having to die that day,” Captain Van Wyk said. “They were willing to run across that open field to get Doc, and shed their blood. But air power made it so they didn’t have to.”

In the quiet after the gunfire died down, Captain Van Wyk watched as Afghan civilians stepped from hiding and began to survey the village. Then a sequence unfolded that filled him with alarm, then relief. As many as 20 of them, including women and children, came from the house he had initially wanted struck with a 500-pound bomb. Marines had been taking fire from there.

Watching the villagers who would have also been killed, he realized that Lieutenant Commander Hoyt had made the better decision. Everyone involved had been spared what might have been years of doubt and regret.

“I talked to him after and said, ‘Thank you for talking me out of that 500-pounder,’ ” he said. “I don’t have to think about that the rest of my life.”

A Complex Network

A few weeks later, another pair of F/A-18s was flying at night over the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. One of the planes was watching over a five-vehicle American convoy as it passed through a canyon and suddenly began taking fire — Taliban guerrillas shooting down from higher ridges in a classic ambush.

The drivers tried to return to their outpost, but were ambushed again. They called to say they could not see all the places the gunfire was coming from.

F/A-18s shifted the dynamic. “We had a pretty good God’s-eye view and could see where the fire was coming from,” said Lt. Kyle Terwilliger, a weapon system officer flying back-seat in one of the jets.

The aircraft shined an infrared marker onto the ridge where the officers saw firing. A ground controller with the convoy, using night-vision goggles, saw the beam and confirmed that it pointed to one of the Taliban’s firing positions.

Its target identified and determined to be away from a populated area, the aircraft was cleared by the ground unit to drop a GBU-12, a 500-pound laser-guided bomb. The strike would not be simple.

There was a low cloud cover, and the ridge was almost against the border; the pilots had to be sure that neither the ordnance nor their aircraft entered Pakistan. “We had to circle around to the south and fly back north, parallel to the border so we didn’t go in,” said Cmdr. Vorrice Burks, the lead pilot, who is also VFA-41 squadron commander.

The bomb struck, and the Taliban firing stopped, he said. The convoy drove on.

In its way, this strike was a model of what air power can do. It was timely, precise and effective, and it neatly integrated communications, logistics, tactics and firepower, freeing American troops from danger in a remote canyon halfway around the world.

It was also so complex — with the assistance of an aerial tanker from the Air Force that allowed Navy aircraft to loiter above a battlefield, the use of an infrared marker for a trained controller with night-vision equipment to confirm a target, the release of a laser-guided bomb near a friendly convoy and an off-limits international border — that almost nothing about it was replicable by Afghan forces.

Asked how Afghan soldiers or police officers might manage a similar tactical problem in the same canyon, Commander Burks gave a knowing frown. “It’s the Wild, Wild West, and the Afghans don’t have these assets to put in the air,” he said. “I don’t know, but they’re not going to do this.”

BioWatch a billion dollar Homeland Security boondoggle!!!

The biodefender that cries wolf

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times

July 8, 2012

DENVER — As Chris Lindley drove to work that morning in August 2008, a call set his heart pounding.

The Democratic National Convention was being held in Denver, and Barack Obama was to accept his party's presidential nomination before a crowd of 80,000 people that night.

The phone call was from one of Lindley's colleagues at Colorado's emergency preparedness agency. The deadly bacterium that causes tularemia — long feared as a possible biological weapon — had been detected at the convention site.

Should they order an evacuation, the state officials wondered? Send inspectors in moon suits? Distribute antibiotics? Delay or move Obama's speech?

Another question loomed: Could they trust the source of the alert, a billion-dollar government system for detecting biological attacks known as BioWatch?

Six tense hours later, Lindley and his colleagues had reached a verdict: false alarm.

BioWatch had failed — again.

President George W. Bushannounced the system's deployment in his 2003 State of the Union address, saying it would "protect our people and our homeland." Since then, BioWatch air samplers have been installed inconspicuously at street level and atop buildings in cities across the country — ready, in theory, to detect pathogens that cause anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, plague and other deadly diseases.

But the system has not lived up to its billing. It has repeatedly cried wolf, producing dozens of false alarms in Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

Worse, BioWatch cannot be counted on to detect a real attack, according to confidential government test results and computer modeling.

The false alarms have threatened to disrupt not only the 2008 Democratic convention, but also the 2004 and 2008 Super Bowls and the 2006 National League baseball playoffs. In 2005, a false alarm in Washington prompted officials to consider closing the National Mall.

In all, federal agencies documented 56 BioWatch false alarms — most of them never disclosed to the public — through 2008. More followed.

The ultimate verdict on BioWatch is that state and local health officials have shown no confidence in it. Not once have they ordered evacuations or distributed emergency medicines in response to a positive reading.

Federal officials have not established the cause of the false alarms, but scientists familiar with BioWatch say they appear to stem from its inability to distinguish between dangerous pathogens and closely related but nonlethal germs.

BioWatch has yet to face an actual biological attack. Field tests and computer modeling, however, suggest it would have difficulty detecting one.

In an attack by terrorists or a rogue state, disease organisms could well be widely dispersed, at concentrations too low to trigger BioWatch but high enough to infect thousands of people, according to scientists with knowledge of the test data who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Even in a massive release, air currents would scatter the germs in unpredictable ways. Huge numbers of air samplers would have to be deployed to reliably detect an attack in a given area, the scientists said.

Many who have worked with BioWatch — from the Army general who oversaw its initial deployment to state and local health officials who have seen its repeated failures up close — call it ill-conceived or unworkable.

"I can't find anyone in my peer group who believes in BioWatch," said Dr. Ned Calonge, chief medical officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment from 2002 to 2010.

"The only times it goes off, it's wrong. I just think it's a colossal waste of money. It's a stupid program."

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that would be chiefly responsible for rushing medications to the site of an attack, told White House aides at a meeting Nov. 21 that they would not do so unless a BioWatch warning was confirmed by follow-up sampling and analysis, several attendees said in interviews.

Those extra steps would undercut BioWatch's rationale: to enable swift treatment of those exposed.

Federal officials also have shelved long-standing plans to expand the system to the nation's airports for fear that false alarms could trigger evacuations of terminals, grounding of flights and needless panic.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees BioWatch, insist that the system's many alerts were not false alarms. Each time, BioWatch accurately detected some organism in the environment, even if it was not the result of an attack and posed no threat to the public, officials said.

At the same time, department officials have assured Congress that newer technology will make BioWatch more reliable and cheaper to operate.

The current samplers are vacuum-powered collection devices, about the size of an office printer, that pull air through filters that trap any airborne materials. In more than 30 cities each day, technicians collect the filters and deliver them to state or local health labs for genetic analysis. Lab personnel look for DNA matches with at least half a dozen targeted pathogens.

The new units would be automated labs in a box. Samples could be analyzed far more quickly and with no need for manual collection.

Buying and operating the new technology, known as Generation 3, would cost about $3.1 billion over the next five years, on top of the roughly $1 billion that BioWatch already has cost taxpayers. The Obama administration is weighing whether to award a multiyear contract.

Generation 3 "is imperative to saving thousands of lives," Dr. Alexander Garza, Homeland Security's chief medical officer, told a House subcommittee on March 29.

But field and lab tests of automated units have raised doubts about their effectiveness. A prototype installed in the New York subway system in 2007 and 2008 produced multiple false readings, according to interviews with scientists. Field tests last year in Chicago found that a second prototype could not operate independently for more than a week at a time.

Most worrisome, testing at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state and at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah found that Generation 3 units could detect a biological agent only if exposed to extremely high concentrations: hundreds of thousands of organisms per cubic meter of air over a six-hour period.

Most of the pathogens targeted by BioWatch, scientists said, can cause sickness or death at much lower levels.

A confidential Homeland Security analysis prepared in January said these "failures were so significant" that the department had proposed thatNorthrop Grumman Corp., the leading competitor for the Generation 3 contract, make "major engineering modifications."

A spokesman for the department, Peter Boogaard, defended the performance of BioWatch. Responding to written questions, he said the department "takes all precautions necessary to minimize the occurrence of both false positive and false negative results."

"Rigorous testing and evaluation" will guide the department's decisions about whether to buy the Generation 3 technology, he said.

Representatives of Northrop Grumman said in interviews that some test results had prompted efforts to improve the automated units' sensitivity and overall performance.

"We had an issue that affected the consistency of the performance of the system," said Dave Tilles, the company's project director. "We resolved it. We fixed it.... We feel like we're ready for the next phase of the program."

In congressional testimony, officials responsible for BioWatch in both the Bush and Obama administrations have made only fleeting references to the system's documented failures.

"BioWatch, as you know, has been an enormous success story," Jay M. Cohen, a Homeland Security undersecretary, told a House subcommittee in 2007.

In June 2009, Homeland Security's then-chief medical officer, Dr. Jon Krohmer, told a House panel: "Without these detectors, the nation has no ability to detect biological attacks until individuals start to show clinical symptoms." Without BioWatch, "needless deaths" could result, he said.

Garza, the current chief medical officer, was asked during his March 29 testimony whether Generation 3 was on track. "My professional opinion is, it's right where it needs to be," he said.

After hearing such assurances, bipartisan majorities of Congress have unfailingly supported additional spending for BioWatch.

*

The problems inherent in what would become BioWatch appeared early.

In February 2002, scientists and technicians from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory deployed a prototype in and around Salt Lake City in preparation for the Winter Olympics. The scientists were aware that false alarms could "cause immense disruptions and panic" and were determined to prevent them, they later wrote in the lab's quarterly magazine.

Sixteen air samplers were positioned at Olympic venues, as well as in downtown Salt Lake City and at the airport. About 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 12, a sample from the airport's C concourse tested positive for anthrax.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt was at an Olympic figure skating competition when the state's public safety director, Bob Flowers, called with the news.

"He told me that they had a positive lead on anthrax at the airport," Leavitt recalled. "I asked if they'd retested it. He said they had — not just once, but four times. And each time it tested positive."

The Olympics marked the first major international gathering since the Sept. 11, 2001, airliner hijackings and the deadly anthrax mailings that fall.

"It didn't take a lot of imagination to say, 'This could be the real thing,'" Leavitt said.

But sealing off the airport would disrupt the Olympics. And "the federal government would have stopped transportation all over the country," as it had after Sept. 11, Leavitt said.

Leavitt ordered hazardous-materials crews to stand by at the airport, though without lights and sirens or conspicuous protective gear.

"He was ready to close the airport and call the National Guard," recalled Richard Meyer, then a federal scientist assisting with the detection technology at the Olympics.

After consulting Meyer and other officials, Leavitt decided to wait until a final round of testing was completed. By 9 p.m., when the results were negative, the governor decided not to order any further response.

"It was a false positive," Leavitt said. "But it was a live-fire exercise, I'll tell you that."

*

The implication — that BioWatch could deliver a highly disruptive false alarm — went unheeded.

After the Olympics, Meyer and others who had worked with the air samplers attended meetings at the Pentagon, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was building a case for rapidly deploying the technology nationwide.

On Jan. 28, 2003, Bush unveiled BioWatch in his State of the Union address, calling it "the nation's first early-warning network of sensors to detect biological attack."

The next month, a group of science and technology advisors to the Defense Department, including Sidney Drell, the noted Stanford University physicist, expressed surprise that "no formal study has been undertaken" of the Salt Lake City incident. The cause of that false alarm has never been identified.

"It is not realistic to undertake a nationwide, blanket deployment of biosensors," the advisory panel, named the JASON group, concluded.

The warning was ignored in the rush to deploy BioWatch. Administration officials also disbanded a separate working group of prominent scientists with expertise in the pathogens.

That group, established by the Pentagon, had been working to determine how often certain germs appear in nature, members of the panel said in interviews. The answer would be key to avoiding false alarms. The idea was to establish a baseline to distinguish between the natural presence of disease organisms and an attack.

The failure to conduct that work has hobbled the system ever since, particularly in regard to tularemia, which has been involved in nearly all of BioWatch's false alarms.

The bacterium that causes tularemia, or rabbit fever, got its formal name, Francisella tularensis, after being found in squirrels in the early 20th century in Central California's Tulare County. About 200 naturally occurring infections in humans are reported every year in the U.S. The disease can be deadly but is readily curable when treated promptly with antibiotics.

Before BioWatch, scientists knew that the tularemia bacterium existed in soil and water. What the scientists who designed BioWatch did not know — because the fieldwork wasn't done — was that nature is rife with close cousins to it.

The false alarms for tularemia appear to have been triggered by those nonlethal cousins, according to scientists with knowledge of the system.

That BioWatch is sensitive enough to register repeated false alarms but not sensitive enough to reliably detect an attack may seem contradictory. But the two tasks involve different challenges.

Any detection system is likely to encounter naturally occurring organisms like the tularemia bacterium and its cousins. Those encounters have the potential to trigger alerts unless the system can distinguish between benign organisms and harmful ones.

Detecting an attack requires a system that is not only discriminating but also highly sensitive — to guarantee that it won't miss traces of deadly germs that might have been dispersed over a large area.

BioWatch is neither discriminating enough for the one task nor sensitive enough for the other.

The system's inherent flaws and the missing scientific work did not slow its deployment. After Bush's speech, the White House assigned Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Reeves, whose office was responsible for developing defenses against chemical and biological attacks, to get BioWatch up and running.

Over the previous year, Reeves had overseen placement of units similar to the BioWatch samplers throughout the Washington area, including the Pentagon, where several false alarms for anthrax and plague later occurred.

Based on that work and computer modeling of the technology's capabilities, Reeves did not see how BioWatch could reliably detect attacks smaller than, for example, a mass-volume spraying from a crop duster.

Nevertheless, the priority was to carry out Bush's directive, swiftly.

"In the senior-level discussions, the issue of efficacy really wasn't on the table," recalled Reeves, who has since retired from the Army. "It was get it done, tell the president we did good, tell the nation that they're protected.… I thought at the time this was good PR, to calm the nation down. But an effective system? Not a chance."

*

It wasn't long before there was a false alarm. Over a three-day period in October 2003, three BioWatch units detected the tularemia bacterium in Houston.

Public health officials were puzzled: The region's hospitals were not reporting anyone sick with the disease.

Dr. Mary desVignes-Kendrick, the city's health director, wanted to question hospital officials in detail to make sure early symptoms of tularemia were not being missed or masked by a flu outbreak. But to desVignes-Kendrick's dismay, Homeland Security officials told her not to tell the doctors and nurses what she was looking for.

"We were hampered by how much we could share on this quote-unquote secret initiative," she said.

After a week, it was clear that the BioWatch alarm was false.

In early 2004, on the eve of the Super Bowl in Houston, BioWatch once again signaled tularemia, desVignes-Kendrick said. The sample was from a location two blocks from Reliant Stadium, where the game was to be played Feb. 1.

DesVignes-Kendrick was skeptical but she and other officials again checked with hospitals before dismissing the warning as another false alarm. The football game was played without interruption.

Nonetheless, three weeks later, Charles E. McQueary, then Homeland Security's undersecretary for science and technology, told a House subcommittee that BioWatch was performing flawlessly.

"I am very pleased with the manner in which BioWatch has worked," he said. "We've had well over half a million samples that have been taken by those sensors. We have yet to have our first false alarm."

Asked in an interview about that statement, McQueary said his denial of any false alarm was based on his belief that the tularemia bacterium had been detected in Houston, albeit not from an attack.

"You can't tell the machine, 'I only want you to detect the one that comes from a terrorist,'" he said.

Whether the Houston alarms involved actual tularemia pathogen has never been determined, but researchers later reported the presence of benign relatives of the pathogen in the metropolitan area.

*

In late September 2005, nearly two years after the first cluster of false alarms in Houston, analysis of filters from BioWatch units on and near the National Mall in Washington indicated the presence of tularemia. Tens of thousands of people had visited the Mall that weekend for a book festival and a protest against the Iraq War. Anyone who had been infected would need antibiotics promptly.

For days, officials from the White House and Homeland Security and other federal agencies privately discussed whether to assume the signal was another false alarm and do nothing, or quarantine the Mall and urge those who had been there to get checked for tularemia.

As they waited for further tests, federal officials decided not to alert local healthcare providers to be on the lookout for symptoms, for fear of creating a panic. Homeland Security officials now say findings from lab analysis of the filters did not meet BioWatch standards for declaring an alert.

Six days after the first results, however, CDC scientists broke ranks and began alerting hospitals and clinics. That was little help to visitors who already had left town, however.

"There were 100 people on one conference call — scientists from all over, public health officials — trying to sort out what it meant," recalled Dr. Gregg Pane, director of Washington's health department at the time.

Discussing the incident soon thereafter, Jeffrey Stiefel, then chief BioWatch administrator for Homeland Security, said agency officials were keenly aware that false alarms could damage the system's credibility.

"If I tell a city that they've got a biological event, and it's not a biological event, you no longer trust that system, and the system is useless," Stiefel said on videotape at a biodefense seminar at the National Institutes of Health on Oct. 6, 2005. "It has to have a high reliability."

Ultimately, no one turned up sick with tularemia.

*

Homeland Security officials have said little publicly about the false positives. And, citing national security and the classification of information, they have insisted that their local counterparts remain mum as well.

Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles County's public health director, whose department has presided over several BioWatch false positives, referred questions to Homeland Security officials.

Dr. Takashi Wada, health officer for the city of Pasadena from 2003 to 2010, was guarded in discussing the BioWatch false positive that occurred on his watch. Wada confirmed that the detection was made, in February 2007, but would not say where in the 23-square-mile city.

"We've been told not to discuss it," he said in an interview.

Dr. Karen Relucio, medical director for the San Mateo County Health Department, acknowledged there was a false positive there in 2008, but declined to elaborate. "I'm not sure it's OK for me to talk about that," said Relucio, who referred further questions to officials in Washington.

In Arizona, officials kept quiet when BioWatch air samplers detected the anthrax pathogen at Super Bowl XLII in February 2008.

Nothing had turned up when technicians checked the enclosed University of Phoenix Stadium before kickoff. But airborne material collected during the first half of the game tested positive for anthrax, said Lt. Col. Jack W. Beasley Jr., chief of the Arizona National Guard's weapons of mass destruction unit.

The Guard rushed some of the genetic material to the state's central BioWatch lab in Phoenix for further testing. Federal and state officials convened a 2 a.m. conference call, only to be told that it was another false alarm.

Although it never made the news, the incident "caused quite a stir," Beasley said.

The director of the state lab, Victor Waddell, said he had been instructed by Homeland Security officials not to discuss the test results. "That's considered national security," he said.

*

In the months before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, local, state and federal officials planned for a worst-case event in Denver, including a biological attack.

Shortly before 9 a.m. on Aug. 28, the convention's final day, that frightening scenario seemed to have come true. That's when Chris Lindley, of the Colorado health department, got the phone call from a colleague, saying BioWatch had detected the tularemia pathogen at the convention site.

Lindley, an epidemiologist who had led a team of Army preventive-medicine specialists in Iraq, had faced crises, but nothing like a bioterrorism attack. Within minutes, his boss, chief medical officer Ned Calonge, arrived.

Calonge had little faith in BioWatch. A couple of years earlier, the health department had been turned upside down responding to what turned out to be a false alarm for Brucella, a bacterium that primarily affects cattle, on Denver's western outskirts.

"The idea behind BioWatch — that you could put out these ambient air filters and they would provide you with the information to save people exposed to a biological attack — it's a concept that you could only put together in theory," Calonge said in an interview. "It's a poorly conceived strategy for doing early detection that is inherently going to pick up false positives."

Lindley and his team arranged a conference call with scores of officials, including representatives from Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Secret Service and the White House.

None of the BioWatch samplers operated by the state had registered a positive, and no unusual cases of infection appeared to have been diagnosed at area hospitals, Lindley said.

The alert had come from a Secret Service-installed sampler on the grounds of the arena where the convention was taking place. The unit was next to an area filled with satellite trucks broadcasting live news reports on the Democratic gathering.

Soon, thousands of conventioneers would be walking from the Pepsi Center to nearby Invesco Field to hear Obama's acceptance speech.

Had Lindley and Calonge been asked, they said in interviews, they wouldn't have put the BioWatch unit at this spot, where foot and vehicle traffic could stir up dust and contaminants that might set off a false alarm. As it turned out, a shade tree 12 yards from the sampler had attracted squirrels, potential carriers of tularemia.

The location near the media trailers posed another problem: how to conduct additional tests without setting off a panic.

EPA officials "said on the phone, 'We have a team standing by, ready to go,'" Lindley recalled. But the technicians would have to wear elaborate protective gear.

The sight of emergency responders in moon suits "would have derailed the convention," Calonge said.

On the other hand, sending personnel in street clothes would risk exposing them to the pathogen.

"This was the biggest decision we ever had to make," Lindley said.

When the conference call resumed, Lindley said the state would collect its own samples, without using conspicuous safety gear. "No one was willing to say, 'That's the right response, Colorado,'" Lindley recalled. "Everybody was frozen. We were on our own."

State workers discreetly gathered samples of soil, water and other items for immediate DNA analysis. No pathogen was found.

At 3 p.m., Lindley told participants in another national conference call that his agency was satisfied there was no threat. "I said: 'We are doing no more sampling. We are closing up this issue,'" Lindley recalled.

Lindley and Calonge, having staked their reputations on not believing BioWatch, were vindicated: Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech on schedule. No one turned up sick with tularemia. And, to their surprise, news of the false alarm never became public.

*

Officials responsible for BioWatch insist that the false alarms, which they refer to as "BioWatch actionable results," or BARs, have been beneficial.

Each incident "has provided local, state and federal government personnel an opportunity to exercise its preparedness plans and coordination activities," three senior Homeland Security BioWatch administrators told a House subcommittee in a statement in July 2008. "These real-world events have been a catalyst for collaboration."

Biologist David M. Engelthaler, who led responses to several BioWatch false positives while serving as Arizona's bioterrorism coordinator, is one of the many public health officials who see it differently.

"A Homeland Security or national security pipe dream," he said, "became our nightmare."

david.willman@latimes.com

The B-1 bomber - Back to the future

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The B-1 bomber - Back to the future

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

DYESS AIR FORCE BASE, Texas – President Obama's new military strategy is taking shape here on the sun-seared grasslands of West Texas where B-1 bomber pilots train.

The strategy pivots from missions over the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan to targets on the sea and, though the military doesn't come out directly and say it, in China. "We're going back to the future," says Col. David Been, commander of the 7th Bomb Wing at Dyess. "As the balance shifts from almost exclusively Afghanistan right now, we're shifting to the Asia-Pacific region."

After a decade of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — 6,350 Americans killed and more than $1 trillion spent — Obama announced the new strategy in January that looks to counter the rising power of China. The changing role of the B-1 is a prime example of how the Air Force is responding.

Suddenly, the B-1, a plane that once seemed irrelevant after the end of the Cold War, is being repurposed again. First, the B-1 became the workhorse of the air war in Afghanistan. Now, as the Pentagon's strategic vision shifts to Asia, so too is the B-1.

"The B-1's capabilities are particularly well-suited to the vast distances and unique challenges of the Pacific region, and we'll continue to invest in, and rely on, the B-1 in support of the focus on the Pacific directed in the president's new strategic guidance," said Maj. Gen. Michael Holmes, assistant deputy chief of staff for Air Force Operations, Plans and Requirements at the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta highlighted those changes during a series of meetings with Pacific leaders recently.

"One of those principles in our strategy is the ability to be agile, to be quickly deployable, to be flexible, and to be on the cutting edge of technology," Panetta said in Cam Ranh, Vietnam. "And in a region as large as the Asia-Pacific region, agility is going to be extremely important in terms of our ability to be able to move quickly."

The armed services also will have to make do with less, with $480 billion in cuts to projected budgets forecast over the next 10 years. That puts a premium on existing weapons, at least in the near term. The Air Force wants a new bomber, one that is invisible to radar and possibly pilot-less. But that plane wouldn't be ready for combat until well into the next decade.

The B-1's revived fortunes, however, bode well for the communities that depend on the jobs affiliated with the bomber. The Air Force employs 13,000 people to support B-1 operations in three states, with an estimated economic impact just shy of $1 billion, records show. Not only is the bomber based at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, but it is also at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and there is a maintenance facility in Oklahoma City.

A long road

It's been a long flight for the B-1 to its current role in the new military strategy. Designed in the 1970s to replace the B-52, the B-1 wasn't ready for missions until 1986.

A main feature is its terrain-following radar that allows the plane to fly itself at low altitude to avoid detection by enemies. "It's designed to fly over the pole by itself, hug the ground — you push a button and you let go — whether it's pitch black, a snowstorm, a rainstorm," Been says. "It would hug the ground, go into Russia, drop nuclear bombs and recover on the other side of the planet somewhere. All by itself. Not talking to anybody."

That sounded good in theory. In practice, the debut stank. "It was a painful birth back in the late '80s for the B-1," says Been, who has flown in the B-1 for 3,500 hours, the equivalent of almost five months. "Engine problems, fuel leaks, it couldn't fly real high. Self-protection … a lot of problems with those right when it came out."

Eventually, the Air Force worked most of the bugs out of the plane.

Today it is the workhorse of the air war in Afghanistan, carrying twice as many bombs and missiles as the aging B-52. The B-1 has dropped 60% of weapons in Afghanistan. Its speed, 900 mph at the top end, allows it to streak across the width of Afghanistan in 45 minutes, critical when troops battling insurgents need air support.

"We're killing bad guys there every day," says Capt. Erick Lord, executive officer for the 7th Bomb Wing.

At other times, Lord says, the B-1 flies close to the ground in a show of force that scares Taliban fighters.

Last year, the bomber dropped bombs in Libya in support of the NATO mission that helped topple Moammar Gadhafi. Two B-1s flew non-stop from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, attacked 45 targets with 2,000-pound bombs, landed, refueled, turned around and hit about as many on the way home.

Equipped with a pod packed with cameras and other sensors, the B-1 also provides high-quality video of insurgent activity on the ground. Its vast fuel tanks allow it to circle overhead for hours before it needs refueling.

With the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan scheduled to end in 2014, the Air Force has begun to focus training for action in the Pacific.

"We're shifting from flying over desert environments to over-water ranges," says Lt. Col. George Holland, commander of the Air Force's 337th Test and Evaluation Squadron.

The Air Force, Holland says, is working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to outfit the B-1 with a long-range anti-ship missile. The bomber will be able to track ships at sea and launch the missiles from "hundreds of miles" away.

Pentagon budget records also show the B-1 is getting a series of modifications over the next few years to improve its capabilities.

With China becoming bolder and more aggressive in and around its territorial waters, the B-1 may have a role to play in the Pacific, says John Pike, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy website. "The South China Sea is the biggest security problem we have today, and it's only going to get worse," Pike says.

China and the Philippines are quarreling over possession of small islands and fishing rights in the sea, and the clashes could escalate. Moreover, critical shipping lanes cross the sea, and it contains oil and natural gas reserves. Pike notes that the Chinese navy recently added an amphibious-assault ship and a hospital ship to its fleet — ships that could be used if the Chinese seek to seize an island.

The Air Force, in a presentation on the bomber's capabilities, shows its range from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Without refueling, the jet can hit targets across most of the South China Sea with 24 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM). Those weapons, cruise missiles that can change course in midflight, can hit moving targets, such as ships.

China's development of so-called anti-access, area-denial weapons, or long-range missiles that can destroy aircraft carriers or hit forward bases, could negate the U.S. military's advantages. The idea is to keep American military might at bay, operating from farther and farther away.

New training began earlier this year for B-1 fliers to use the stand-off missile in the Pacific, says Capt. Kyle Schlewinsky, assistant director of flying for the 28th Bomb Squadron. "That's the next fight that everybody's worried about," he says. "It's no secret that if you fight the U.S. straight up, you lose."

Seeking relevance

Part of the Air Force interest in trumpeting the B-1's capability might stem from a desire to emerge from the shadows cast by the Army and Marine Corps, which have done most of the fighting in the last decade, Pike says. "The Air Force would be very eager to bring the B-1 to the table to demonstrate that they are relevant," he says.

Just how relevant is open to question, says Barry Watts, a former fighter pilot and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-partisan military think tank in Washington.

The B-1 lacks the stealth of its more advanced, radar-eluding cousin, the B-2 bomber. Countries with stout air defenses would pose serious threats.

"It's not a stealthy air platform," Watts says. "Penetration of advanced air defenses would be a real problem."

Been, the colonel with decades of experience with the B-1, says its speed, ability to stay aloft for hours and payload of long-range missiles could be critical for missions in the Pacific. "Those could help kick down the doors," he says.

U.S. commandos are in Mali????

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Mysterious fatal crash offers rare look at U.S. commando presence in Mali

By Craig Whitlock, Published: July 8

In pre-dawn darkness, a ­Toyota Land Cruiser skidded off a bridge in North Africa in the spring, plunging into the Niger River. When rescuers arrived, they found the bodies of three U.S. Army commandos — alongside three dead women.

What the men were doing in the impoverished country of Mali, and why they were still there a month after the United States suspended military relations with its government, is at the crux of a mystery that officials have not fully explained even 10 weeks later.

At the very least, the April 20 accident exposed a team of Special Operations forces that had been working for months in Mali, a Saharan country racked by civil war and a rising Islamist insurgency. More broadly, the crash has provided a rare glimpse of elite U.S. commando units in North Africa, where they have been secretly engaged in counterterrorism actions against al-Qaeda affiliates.

The Obama administration has not publicly acknowledged the existence of the missions, although it has spoken in general about plans to rely on Special Operations forces as a cornerstone of its global counterterrorism strategy. In recent years, the Pentagon has swelled the ranks and resources of the Special Operations Command, which includes such units as the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force, even as the overall number of U.S. troops is shrinking.

At the same time, the crash in Mali has revealed some details of the commandos’ clandestine activities that apparently had little to do with counterterrorism. The women killed in the wreck were identified as Moroccan prostitutes who had been riding with the soldiers, according to a senior Army official and a U.S. counterterrorism consultant briefed on the incident, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, which is conducting a probe of the fatal plunge off the Martyrs Bridge in Bamako, the capital of Mali, said it does not suspect foul play but has “not completely ruled it out.” Other Army officials cited poor road conditions and excessive speed as the likely cause of the 5 a.m. crash.

U.S. officials have revealed few details about the soldiers’ mission or their backgrounds, beyond a brief news release announcing their deaths hours after the accident.

In many countries, including most in Africa, Special Operations forces work openly to distribute humanitarian aid and train local militaries. At times, the civil-affairs assignments can provide credible cover for clandestine counterterrorism units.

But in Mali, U.S. military personnel had ceased all training and civil-affairs work by the end of March, about a week after the country’s democratically elected president was overthrown in a military coup.

The military’s Africa Command, which oversees operations on the continent, said the three service members killed were among “a small number of personnel” who had been aiding the Malian military before the coup and had remained in the country to “provide assistance to the U.S. Embassy” and “maintain situational awareness on the unfolding events.”

Megan Larson-Kone, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Mali, said the soldiers had stayed in Bamako because they were “winding down” civil- affairs programs in the aftermath of the coup while holding out hope “that things would turn around quickly” so they could resume their work.

Two of the soldiers, Capt. ­Daniel H. Utley, 33, and Sgt. 1st Class Marciano E. Myrthil, 39, were members of the 91st Civil Affairs Battalion, 95th Civil Affairs Brigade, which is based at Fort Bragg, N.C.

For two months after the crash, the U.S. military withheld the identity of the third soldier killed. In response to inquiries from The Washington Post, the Army named him as Master Sgt. Trevor J. Bast, 39, a communications technician with the Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir.

The Intelligence and Security Command is a little-known and secretive branch of the Army that specializes in communications intercepts. Its personnel often work closely with the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees missions to capture or kill terrorism suspects overseas.

During his two decades of service, Bast revealed little about the nature of his work to his family. “He did not tell us a lot about his life, and we respected that for security purposes,” his mother, Thelma Bast of Gaylord, Mich., said in a brief interview. “We never asked questions, and that’s the honest truth.”

Haven for Islamist militants

U.S. counterterrorism officials have long worried about Mali, a weakly governed country of 14.5 million people that has served as a refuge for Islamist militants allied with al-Qaeda.

With only 6,000 poorly equipped troops, the Malian armed forces have always struggled to maintain control of their territory, about twice the size of Texas. Repeated famines and rebellions by Tuareg nomads only exacerbated the instability.

About six years ago, the Pentagon began bolstering its overt aid and training programs in Mali, as well as its clandestine operations.

Under a classified program code-named Creek Sand, dozens of U.S. personnel and contractors were deployed to West Africa to conduct surveillance missions over the country with single- engine aircraft designed to look like civilian passenger planes.

In addition, the military flew spy flights over Mali and other countries in the region with ­longer-range P-3 Orion aircraft based in the Mediterranean, according to classified U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

In what would have represented a significant escalation of U.S. military involvement in Mali, the Pentagon also considered a ­secret plan in 2009 to embed American commandos with ­Malian ground troops, diplomatic cables show.

Under that program, code-named Oasis Enabler, U.S. military advisers would conduct ­anti-terrorism operations alongside elite, American-trained ­Malian units. But the idea was rejected by Gillian A. Milovanovic, the ambassador to Mali at the time.

In an October 2009 meeting in Bamako with Vice Adm. Robert T. Moeller, deputy chief of the Africa Command, the ambassador called the plan “extremely problematic,” adding that it could create a popular backlash and “risk infuriating” neighbors such as Algeria.

Furthermore, Milovanovic warned that the U.S. advisers “would likely serve as lightning rods, exposing themselves and the Malian contingents to specific risk,” according to a State Department cable summarizing the meeting.

Moeller replied that he “regretted” that the ambassador had not been kept better informed and said Oasis Enabler was “a work in progress.” It is unclear whether the plan was carried out.

Since then, however, security in Mali has deteriorated sharply. After the coup in March, extremist Muslim guerrillas in northern Mali declared an independent Islamist state. They have imposed sharia law and have begun enforcing strict social codes that include compulsory beards for men and a ban on television.

In the fabled desert city of Timbuktu, al-Qaeda sympathizers have destroyed ancient mausoleums and attacked other shrines as part of a religious cleansing campaign. Western aid workers have abandoned the northern half of the country after a string of kidnappings.

Thousands of Malians have fled to refu­gee camps in neighboring countries.

A fatal plunge

The three soldiers riding through Bamako in April had rented their 2010 Toyota Land Cruiser from a local agency, according to written statements provided to The Post by the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg.

Bast was in the driver’s seat and was headed south across the Martyrs Bridge. Preliminary investigative results determined that he lost control of the Land Cruiser, which broke through the bridge’s guard rail and landed in the river below.

Also in the vehicle were three Moroccan women, according to the Army’s statement. Contributing factors in the accident, the Army said, were limited visibility and “a probable evasive maneuver on the part of the vehicle’s driver to avoid impacting with slower moving traffic.”

The soldiers died of “blunt force trauma” when the vehicle landed upside down in the shallow river, crushing the roof, the Army said.

The Special Operations Command said it could not answer questions about where the soldiers were going, nor why they were traveling with the unidentified Moroccan women, saying the matter is under investigation.

Larson-Kone, the embassy spokeswoman, said the soldiers were on “personal, not business-related travel” at the time, but she declined to provide details. Officials from the Africa Command also said that they did not know who the women were, but they added in a statement: “From what we know now, we have no reason to believe these women were engaged in acts of prostitution.”

Coincidentally, the incident occurred less than a week after President Obama’s visit to a summit in Cartagena, Colombia, where U.S. military personnel and Secret Service agents became embroiled in a scandal involving prostitutes.

Little details not adding up

At least two of the soldiers in Mali had been trained as communications or intelligence specialists.

Bast, the master sergeant, was a ham radio hobbyist who originally joined the Navy before switching to the Army several years ago. An Army spokesman described him as a “communications expert” and said he was posthumously given the Meritorious Service Medal but declined to say why.

Myrthil was a native of Haiti who joined the Army two decades ago. Military officials released virtually no details about his service record.

Utley, the captain, was a Kentucky native who joined the Army in 2002 to work as a signals and communications officer but later transferred to the Special Forces.

Friends said he had expected to deploy to Afghanistan last summer but received last-minute orders to go to Africa instead. His Mali assignment was scheduled to end this spring but was extended, they said.

Three weeks after the coup, on April 11, Utley sent a brief e-mail to a friend from college, Chris Atzinger, to report that he was all right and that he would write more later.

Atzinger said he and other friends of Utley’s were frustrated that the Army hasn’t given a clearer explanation of how he died. “Those little details don’t seem to add up,” Atzinger said. “All of us are resigned to the fact that we won’t ever know.”

Utley, a graduate of the University of Louisville, was a McConnell Scholar, part of a leadership program named after Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate minority leader. Less than a week after the fatal crash, McConnell gave a eulogy to Utley on the Senate floor, calling him “an American hero and patriot.”

Gary Gregg, director of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, called Utley a star student and “just a terrific kid.” But he said the official account of the crash didn’t make sense.

“It seems really dubious that six people died in a single-car accident. It’s just very fishy,” Gregg said in a telephone interview.

Dana Priest and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

13 minutes to doomsday

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13 minutes to doomsday

By Editorial Board, Published: July 8

THROUGHOUT THE Cold War, the United States kept land-based missiles with nuclear warheads on alert and ready to launch in three to four minutes after the president gave the order. Every president of the missile age was briefed about the procedure: In the event of an impending attack, the decision to launch would have to be made in 13 minutes or less. The theory of deterrence was that the United States had to threaten certain and large-scale retaliation against the Soviet Union, and that meant being prepared to shoot fast.

When new presidents were briefed about how it worked, they found it unthinkable. “And we call ourselves the human race,” John F. Kennedy is said to have commented. Not the least of their worries was the prospect of incomplete or faulty warning — a bad signal from a satellite, perhaps, or a missile launched by accident or by rogue actors. There was never a real missile attack during the superpower arms race, but there were serious false alarms.

Today, two decades after the end of the Cold War, one-third of U.S. strategic forces, including almost all land-based missiles and some sea-based, are still on launch-ready alert. Recently, retired Gen. James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for rethinking this posture. Mr. Cartwright, a former commander of strategic forces, said in a report sponsored by the group Global Zero that the United States could stand down the missiles so that 24 to 72 hours would be needed to launch, what is known as “de-alerting.” There are different methods to carry this out, from software modifications to physically separating warheads from the missiles.

President Obama pledged in his 2008 campaign to work with Russia to take missiles off launch-ready alert status, and the idea was examined in the administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. One option was to de-alert the land-based missiles, but that was rejected on grounds that, in a crisis, there could be a destabilizing race to re-alert. Similarly, a proposal to de-alert the submarines, by keeping more at port, was also rejected. The published document said that launch-ready status “should be maintained for the present.”

In the coming weeks, the president is expected to sign off on instructions to the military to implement the posture review. No change is anticipated in alert levels. Gen. C. Robert Kehler, the current commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said recently that he is reluctant to de-alert missiles because it would be hard to verify if some adversary posed a risk of surprise attack. We agree that verification is difficult, but that is all the more reason to look for ways to make it work.

The reason the United States maintains a prompt-launch posture today is because Russia does also. China does not keep weapons on launch-ready alert. The United States and Russia are no longer enemies; the chance of nuclear war or surprise attack is nearly zero. A small step toward reducing the danger was taken in 1994, when Russia and the United States agreed to aim nuclear missiles at the open oceans, or at nothing. But this did not resolve the time pressures on a president, nor relax the launch-on-warning posture that still prevails.

Clearly, there won’t be any arms control negotiations with Russia this election year. But this is a complex problem that could benefit from careful preparation. Mr. Obama has declared his commitment “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” A good start would be to give himself and mankind some breathing room. Today, the United States and Russia have as many as 1,800 warheads on alert at any given time. This is overkill and unnecessary so long after the Cold War has ended. We think that both countries should ease off the alert status for strategic forces.

Surveillance requests to cellphone carriers surge

Cops want to know who you call, where you are and what you texted.

Sadly many cellphone carriers will give this information to the cops without a search warrant.

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Surveillance requests to cellphone carriers surge

Jul. 9, 2012 05:29 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Law enforcement agencies in the U.S. made more than 1.3 million requests for consumers' cellphone records in 2011, an alarming surge over previous years that reflected the increasingly gray area between privacy and technology.

Cellphone carriers, responding to inquiries from a member of Congress, reported responding to as many as thousands of police requests daily for customers' locations, text messages and call details, frequently without warrants. Special legal teams operating round-the-clock have been set up to field requests, and some carriers hoping to recoup their costs have created detailed menus of what records can be provided -- and for what price.

The reports -- the first comprehensive review of the extent of law enforcement requests in the U.S. -- shed light on the difficulties cellphone carriers face in balancing consumer privacy and public safety. They also prompted civil libertarians to decry the lack of legal clarity about when and how carriers should hand over information about their customers.

At AT&T, a team of more than 100 workers handles the requests pouring in from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. More than 250,000 such requests came in last year -- a more than two-fold increase over five years ago.

Sprint said it received about 500,000 subpoenas in 2011. Verizon and T-Mobile, two other major U.S. carriers, both reported annual increases in requests exceeding 12 percent. Cricket has seen a steady increase every year since 2007, and although the company once had a 10-person team handling inquiries, it has now outsourced that task to a company called Neustar.

Many of the requests cover a number of cellphone subscribers.

The costs have become so large that carriers have started charging law enforcement for the records they turn over. AT&T collected almost $8.3 million in 2011 in fees from police agencies, although the company said it believes that number falls far short of what it costs AT&T to accommodate the requests.

Police requesting data from U.S. Cellular are asked to pay $25 to locate a cellphone using GPS (the first three requests are free), $25 to retrieve a user's text messages and $50 for a "cell tower dump" -- a breakdown of all the cellphones that interacted with a given cellphone tower at a specific time.

"Cell phone records have clearly become central to many, many law enforcement investigations," said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The danger is that the standard is very unclear."

All the companies who responded to letters from Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said that under normal circumstances, only requests that came with a warrant attached were granted. T-Mobile said it had referred two inappropriate requests from law enforcement to the FBI, and rejected other requests where people had impersonated police officers. Others said they complied with subpoenas, which don't require sign-off from a judge.

But there's a major exception for emergencies, or "exigent circumstances." If a 911 call center believes there is an immediate threat to someone's life, it can bypass the need for a prosecutor or a judge to sign off on the request. All that's needed, in most circumstances, is a simple form.

"If a victim goes missing and they had a cell phone with GPS technology, would you, as a loved one, want us to have to wait for a subpoena or court order even though we know someone might be in dire straits?" said Chris Perkins, the police chief in Roanoke, Va.

Federal law, which has yet to fully adapt to today's high-tech, wireless society, has much to say about wiretaps and home searches but surprisingly little to say about cellphone records. The law is especially vague when it comes to GPS tracking, a relatively new issue triggered by the widespread adoption of smartphones that help users navigate from place to place.

Many states and local courts have been left to come up with their own requirements for when a warrant is required to track someone's location, leading to an array of conflicting policies that create a headache for those tracking suspects of victims across state lines.

In May, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., asked the Justice Department how many requests for location information it had filed with cellphone carriers, and what legal standard applies when making such requests. The department said it didn't keep a running tally and couldn't offer numbers, but that in regular criminal investigations, a court order is used to compel carriers to provide the information.

"This information is critical to such investigations into a wide variety of offenses, including murder, bank robbery, gang activity, fraud, sexual exploitation of children and kidnapping," wrote Acting Assistant Attorney General Judith Appelbaum.

Franken said he was troubled by magnitude of the requests revealed Monday in Markey's reports, which were first reported by The New York Times. He said it's unacceptable that the Justice Department isn't tracking its own requests.

"The department has a lot of questions to answer, and it's clear we must do more to strike the right balance between the needs of law enforcement and privacy," Franken.

Those seeking clarification for what is in or out of bounds looked hopefully in January to the U.S. Supreme Court, which took up the GPS issue when it ruled that law enforcement cannot attach GPS tracking devices to someone's vehicle without a warrant. But the ruling was narrow and didn't deal specifically with cellphones already in someone's possession that happen to have GPS capabilities.

Bipartisan bills to address the issue were introduced in the House and Senate a year ago but never moved out of committees. The Digital Due Process Coalition, an assortment of groups including cellphone carriers and civil liberties advocates, wants the Electronic Communications Privacy Act amended to deal with it. That law was enacted in 1986, long before cellphones became a basic accessory.

"We don't know the standard that is used for the gathering, handling or disposal of information about innocent Americans," Markey said in an interview. "We need a Fourth Amendment for the 21st century. Technologies change."

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Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at twitter.com/joshledermanAP.

Police requesting Americans' cellphone data at staggering rate

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Police requesting Americans' cellphone data at staggering rate

By Matt Pearce

July 9, 2012, 3:39 p.m.

Police are monitoring Americans’ cellphone use at a staggering rate, according to new information released in a congressional inquiry.

In letters released by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), cellphone companies described seeing a huge uptick in requests from law enforcement agencies, with 1.3 million federal, state and local requests for phone records in 2011 alone.

“We cannot allow privacy protections to be swept aside with the sweeping nature of these information requests, especially for innocent consumers,” Markey said in a statement Monday. “Law enforcement agencies are looking for a needle, but what are they doing with the haystack? We need to know how law enforcement differentiates between records of innocent people, and those that are subjects of investigation, as well as how it handles, administers, and disposes of this information.”

The data obtained by law enforcement in some requests included location information, text messages and “cell tower dumps” that include any calls made through a tower for a certain period of time. The carriers say the information is given away in response to warrants or emergencies where someone is in “imminent” danger.

“There is no comprehensive reporting of these information requests anywhere,” Markey’s office said in a statement. “This is the first ever accounting of this.”

According to a May 29 letter, AT&T said it responds to roughly 230 emergency requests a day for kidnappings, missing persons and attempted suicides and similar incidents, with 100 full-time workers responding to requests 24 hours a day.

AT&T said it had responded to 131,400 criminal subpoenas in 2011, up from 63,100 in 2007.

Verizon Wireless, in a less detailed response, gave a similar figure to AT&T for criminal subpoena requests in 2011. Such subpoenas grant law enforcement access to records similar to those that appear on a phone bill.

T-Mobile said it would not release data on how many requests it receives but said “the number of requests has risen dramatically in the last decade with an annual increase of approximately 12-16%.” The company also said it had received two inappropriate requests for information over the past three years and had referred the cases to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Sprint estimated it had received 500,000 subpoenas in 2011 -- the most of all the phone companies, although it is only the third-largest carrier -- but noted that the figure is not representative of how many people were getting caught up in police requests. “Each subpoena typically requested subscriber information on multiple subscribers,” the company said.

Sprint also asked that Congress clarify the law on the disclosure of location information, citing “contradictory” legal standards.

The growth of cellphone use, private computing and social-media use in recent years has greatly expanded the wealth of information available to law enforcement agencies in investigations, a development in which police investigative abilities have expanded faster than the public has been able to keep track of the extent to which it’s being watched.

Last week, Twitter made a similar announcement on its website regarding police surveillance requests, reporting that government requests for user data in the first six months of 2012 had already surpassed the number of requests in all of 2011.

The phone carriers are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which limits subpoena requests to basic subscriber information and requires warrants or court orders to grant access to access the content of text messages. Wiretaps require court orders with probable cause.

The new information released by Markey provoked a slightly surprised response from communications experts and privacy advocates.

“The numbers don’t lie: location tracking is out of control,” Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the ACLU, noted in an analysis of the new data.

Over at the libertarian Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez spotted a discrepancy between the number of wiretaps reported by Sprint over the past five years -- 52,029 -- and the numbers that the government itself has been keeping, which only total 24,270. That suggests either Sprint’s data is wrong or that the government isn’t counting or disclosing all of its wiretaps.

“The disconnect between the official figures and what’s suggested by Sprint’s response is profound,” Sanchez wrote. “Congress has a responsibility to keep probing until we understand why.”

Afghan exit will cost U.S. billions

Source

Afghan exit will cost U.S. billions, Pentagon's No. 2 says

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – Moving the mountain of U.S. military gear out of Afghanistan after more than a decade of war will cost billions of dollars and prove far more difficult than last year's withdrawal from Iraq, the Pentagon's No. 2 official said Tuesday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's point man for overseeing the drawdown in Afghanistan, talked about the challenges in his first extensive interview on pulling out of Afghanistan.

The pace of withdrawal is picking up: About 20,000 U.S. servicemembers and their gear will be coming home by October. There are about 88,000 American servicemembers there now. All U.S. combat forces are to leave by 2014. Meanwhile, the main overland supply route through neighboring Pakistan reopened last week. It had been closed since November after U.S. forces mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops on the border.

"It's a very austere logistics environment to transport anything," Carter said. "Combat is still going on. Terrible terrain. Narrow roads. Long way to a seaport. Afghanistan is orders of magnitude more challenging for …(withdrawal) than was Iraq."

In Iraq, the military essentially loaded up trucks, drove south a few hundred miles to Kuwait and shipped them home. This year, the Pentagon asked for $2.9 billion to pay for repairing and replacing equipment removed last year.

Landlocked Afghanistan requires a 1,000-mile drive on rough, dangerous road to the port in Karachi, Pakistan. So far, just a trickle of trucks has moved through the two Pakistani border crossings — five trucks in the north, and nine in the south, Carter said. It will take as long as three months for traffic to flow freely through Pakistan there, he said.

Even so, that is the best option. Flying equipment out, or using the long, overland route through nations to the north, has added as much as $100 million a month in transportation costs, he said.

"The challenge of getting in and out of Afghanistan tells us a lot about why Osama bin Laden went there in the first place," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute and a defense industry consultant. "The leaders of al-Qaeda knew it would be very hard to sustain a war effort in such a place."

Some of the challenges in Afghanistan, according to Carter, include:

•Dismantling 400 bases. Every item has to be inventoried, cleaned and shipped out — back home, or to stocks of equipment positioned around the globe. Some can be left to Afghans, though not much, he said, because they have limited ability to maintain gear.

•Returning 100,000 shipping containers, large metal boxes. The military paid more than $610 million in late fees over the past decade to shipping companies for failing to return containers on time, Pentagon records show.

•Bringing home 45,000 miltiary vehicles, including 14,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) trucks. The vehicles, per U.S. Department of Agriculture requirements, must be cleaned of dirt chunks larger than a finger to avoid bringing alien species home.

"All that stuff has to come out now along the same slender arteries it came in on," Carter said. "That is a very big difference from the last one of these I did, which was two years ago in Iraq."

Billions likely wasted in Iraq work

Source

Auditors say billions likely wasted in Iraq work

By ROBERT BURNS | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can't say how much.

In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation" in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.

"The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known," the report said.

The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company's billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.

With dry understatement, the inspector general said that while he couldn't pinpoint the amount wasted, it "could be substantial."

Asked why the exact amount squandered can never be determined, the inspector general's office referred The Associated Press to a report it did in February 2009 titled "Hard Lessons," in which it said the auditors — much like the reconstruction managers themselves — faced personnel shortages and other hazards.

"Given the vicissitudes of the reconstruction effort — which was dogged from the start by persistent violence, shifting goals, constantly changing contracting practices and undermined by a lack of unity of effort — a complete accounting of all reconstruction expenditures is impossible to achieve," the report concluded.

In that same report, the inspector general, Stuart Bowen, recalled what then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked when they met shortly after Bowen started in January 2004: "Why did you take this job? It's an impossible task."

By law, Bowen's office reports to both the secretary of defense and the secretary of state. It goes out of business in 2013.

Bowen's office has spent more than $200 million tracking the reconstruction funds, and in addition to producing numerous reports, his office has investigated criminal fraud that has resulted in 87 indictments, 71 convictions and $176 million in fines and other penalties. These include civilians and military members accused of kickbacks, bribery, bid-rigging, fraud, embezzlement and outright theft of government property and funds.

Much, however, apparently got overlooked. Example: A $35 million Pentagon project was started in December 2006 to establish the Baghdad airport as an international economic gateway, and the inspector general found that by the end of 2010 about half the money was "at risk of being wasted" unless someone else completed the work.

Of the $51 billion that Congress approved for Iraq reconstruction, about $20 billion was for rebuilding Iraqi security forces and about $20 billion was for rebuilding the country's basic infrastructure. The programs were run mainly by the Defense Department, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A key weakness found by Bowen's inspectors was inadequate reviewing of contractors' invoices.

In some cases invoices were checked months after they had been paid because there were too few government contracting officers. Bowen found a case in which the State Department had only one contracting officer in Iraq to validate more than $2.5 billion in spending on a DynCorp contract for Iraqi police training.

"As a result, invoices were not properly reviewed, and the $2.5 billion in U.S. funds were vulnerable to fraud and waste," the report said. "We found this lack of control to be especially disturbing since earlier reviews of the DynCorp contract had found similar weaknesses."

In that case, the State Department eventually reconciled all of the old invoices and as of July 2009 had recovered more than $60 million.

The report touched on a problem that cropped up in virtually every major aspect of the U.S. war effort in Iraq, namely, the consequences of fighting an insurgency that proved more resilient than the Pentagon had foreseen. That not only made reconstruction more difficult, dangerous and costly, but also left the U.S. military unprepared for the grind of multiple troop deployments, the tactics of an adaptable insurgency and the complexity of battlefield wounds. It also left the U.S. government short of the expertise it needed to monitor contractors.

Although the audit was labeled as final, a spokesman for Bowen's office, Christopher M. Griffith, said several more will be done to provide additional details on what the U.S. got for its reconstruction dollars and what was wasted.

___

Robert Burns can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/robertburnsAP

___

Online:

The auditor report can be found at www.sigir.mil/files/audits/12-017.pdf#view=fit

A secret Federal database of alleged criminals???

"SAVE" for "Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements"

From this article it seems like the Feds have a secret database of who they consider criminals. The secret part is what bothers me.

The database seems to be named "SAVE" for "Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements"

Source

AP NewsBreak: Feds OK Fla. access to citizens list

By CHARLES BABINGTON | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a victory for Republicans, the federal government has agreed to let Florida use a law enforcement database to challenge people's right to vote if they are suspected of not being U.S. citizens.

The agreement, made in a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott's administration that was obtained by The Associated Press, grants the state access to a list of resident noncitizens maintained by the Homeland Security Department. The Obama administration had denied Florida's request for months but relented after a judge ruled in the state's favor in a related voter-purge matter.

Voting rights groups, while acknowledging that noncitizens have no right to vote, have expressed alarm about using such data for a purpose not originally intended: purging voter lists of ineligible people. They also say voter purges less than four months before a presidential election might leave insufficient time to correct mistakes stemming from faulty data or other problems.

Democrats say that the government's concession is less troubling than some GOP-controlled states' push to require voters to show photo identification.

But Republicans count it as a victory nonetheless in their broad-based fight over voter eligibility, an issue that could play a big role in the White House race. That's especially true in pivotal states such as Florida, Colorado, Nevada and North Carolina.

Republican officials in several states say they are trying to combat voter fraud. Democrats, however, note that proven cases of voter fraud are rare. They accuse Republicans of cynical efforts to suppress voting by people in lower socio-economic groups who tend to vote Democratic.

The Homeland Security decision may affect places beyond Florida, because Colorado and other states have asked for similar access to the federal database.

After a judge recently ruled against federal efforts to stop Florida's aggressive voter-list review, Homeland Security agreed to work on details for how the state can access the federal SAVE database — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — to challenge registered voters suspected of being noncitizens.

Florida has agreed that it can challenge voters only if the state provides a "unique identifier," such as an "alien number," for each person in question. Alien numbers generally are assigned to foreigners living in the country legally, often with visas or other permits such as green cards.

Unless they become naturalized citizens, however, they cannot vote.

The agreement will prevent Florida from using only a name and birthdate to seek federal data about a suspected noncitizen on voter rolls.

The SAVE list is unlikely to catch illegal immigrants in any state who might have managed to register to vote because such people typically would not have an alien number.

Scott, whose administration had sued Homeland Security for access to the SAVE list, said the agreement "marks a significant victory for Florida and for the integrity of our election system."

"Access to the SAVE database will ensure that noncitizens do not vote in future Florida elections," Scott said in a statement Saturday.

In a letter Monday, the department told Florida it was ready to work out details for providing access to the SAVE list. The letter was signed by Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

It follows a flurry of legal actions between Florida and the federal government. On June 11, the Justice Department said it would sue Scott's administration on grounds that the state's voter-purge efforts violated voting rights laws.

The same day, Scott announced a lawsuit against Homeland Security seeking access to the SAVE list. He said it could be a valuable tool in determining who is a citizen. Two weeks later, a U.S. judge blocked the federal attempts to stop Florida's voter review efforts; the Mayorkas letter soon followed.

A Homeland Security spokesman said Saturday the agency had no further comment.

Department officials told the Orlando Sentinel last month they had concerns about using the SAVE list for voter-review purposes. They said the list's information is incomplete and does not provide comprehensive data on all eligible voters, the newspaper reported.

Scott's administration hopes to restart a suspended voter registration purge that was hampered this year by faulty data and bad publicity. The review, using driver's license information, initially produced 180,000 voters' names considered worthy of checking. County election supervisors examined 2,625 people on the list. But more than 500 were soon found to be citizens, and the review was halted.

State records show that 86 noncitizens were removed from the voter rolls since April 11, and more than half of them had voted in previous elections.

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner asked election officials Saturday to restart the review. He said it will "include a carefully calibrated matching process" between the state's driver and voter data "before any records are verified through SAVE."

But Florida Sen. Arthenia Joyner, a Tampa Democrat, said Scott and his team should not be purging voter lists so close to a big election.

"This is just another in the continuing saga of his efforts to suppress the vote, along with a lot of the other Republican governors," Joyner said. "They are all caught up in trying to keep this president from getting re-elected."

While some noncitizens who are legal residents may knowingly try to register and vote, others apparently do so unwittingly. After obtaining a driver's license, some assume they also can vote, officials say.

Access to the federal SAVE list may catch such ineligible voters in Florida. They presumably would have an alien number and be listed in state motor vehicle records.

Voter-rights groups expressed concerns about Florida's efforts.

"No matter what database Florida has access to, purging voters from the rolls using faulty criteria on the eve of an election could prevent thousands of eligible voters from exercising their rights," said Jonathan Brater, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. "Florida must use a more transparent and accurate process and must leave enough time for voters targeted for removal to be notified and correct errors," he said.

Some state governments have sought access to the federal database for years. Federal officials told Washington state in 2005 they saw no way to compare voters and the Homeland Security information.

Colorado has sought the federal data for a year. Colorado, which has a Democratic governor but a Republican secretary of state, Scott Gessler, has identified about 5,000 registered voters that it wants to check against the federal information.

Officials in the politically competitive states of Ohio, Michigan, New Mexico and Iowa — all led by GOP governors — are backing his efforts.

Gessler said 430 registered voters have acknowledged being ineligible, but an "unenforceable honor system does not build confidence in our elections."

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

In 2007, five years after the George W. Bush administration launched a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department found virtually no evidence of organized efforts to influence federal elections with ineligible voters.

___

Associated Press writers Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Fla., and Mike Baker in Olympia, Wash., contributed to this report.

Egyptians pelt Clinton motorcade with tomatoes

Source

Egyptians pelt Clinton motorcade with tomatoes

Reuters

By Arshad Mohammed and Marwa Awad

CAIRO (Reuters) - Protesters threw tomatoes and shoes at U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade on Sunday during her first visit to Egypt since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.

A tomato struck an Egyptian official in the face, and shoes and a water bottle landed near the armoured cars carrying Clinton's delegation in the port city of Alexandria.

A senior state department official said that neither Clinton nor her vehicle, which were around the corner from the incident, were struck by any of the projectiles.

Protesters chanted: "Monica, Monica", a reference to Former President Bill Clinton's extra-marital affair. Some chanted: "leave, Clinton", Egyptian security officials said.

It was not clear who the protesters were or what political affiliations they had. Protesters outside Clinton's hotel on Saturday night chanted anti-Islamist slogans, accusing the United States of backing the Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power.

The assault on her motorcade came on a day Clinton spoke at the newly re-opened U.S. consulate in Alexandria, addressing accusations the United States, which had long supported former President Hosni Mubarak, of backing one faction or another in Egypt following his ouster last year.

"I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which of course we cannot," Clinton said.

Clinton also met the country's top general, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, on Sunday to discuss Egypt's turbulent democratic transition as the military wrestles for influence with the new president.

RIGHTS OF ALL

The meeting came a day after she met Mursi, whose powers were clipped by the military days before he took office.

Mursi fired back by reinstating the Islamist-dominated parliament that the army leadership had disbanded after a court declared it void, deepening the stand-off before the new leader even had time to form a government.

The result has been acute political uncertainty as the various power centres try to find a way to get along in a country that still has no permanent constitution, parliament or government more than a year after Mubarak's downfall.

In their hour-long meeting, Clinton and Tantawi discussed Egypt's political transition and the military's "ongoing dialogue with President Mursi," a U.S. official travelling with Clinton said in an email brief.

"Tantawi stressed that this is what Egyptians need most now - help getting the economy back on track," the official said.

Clinton "stressed the importance of protecting the rights of all Egyptians, including women and minorities".

The talks also touched on the increasingly lawless Sinai region and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Speaking after the meeting, Tantawi said the army respected the presidency but would not be deterred from its role of "protecting" Egypt.

"The armed forces and the army council respects legislative and executive authorities," he said in a speech to troops in the city of Ismailia. "The armed forces would not allow anyone to discourage it from its role in protecting Egypt and its people."

TIES STRAINED

Ties with the United States, which provides Egypt with an annual $1.3 billion in military aid, were strained this year when Egyptian judicial police raided the offices of several U.S.-backed non-governmental organisations on suspicion of illegal foreign funding and put several Americans on trial.

The spat ended when Egyptian authorities allowed the U.S. citizens and other foreign workers to leave the country.

During her speech, Clinton said: "When we talk about supporting democracy, we mean real democracy."

"To us real democracy means that every citizen has the right to live, work and worship as they choose, whether they are man or woman, Christian or Muslim."

"Real democracy means that no group or faction or leader can impose their will, their ideology, their religion, their desires on anyone else."

That was a message she is likely to have repeated in meetings on Sunday with women and Christians, both groups that fear their rights may be curtailed under a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government.

"She wanted, in very, very clear terms, particularly with the Christian group this morning, to dispel that notion and to make clear that only Egyptians can choose their leaders, that we have not supported any candidate, any party, and we will not," a senior U.S. official told reporters.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Indian fishermen say U.S. boat fired without warning

Indian fishermen say U.S. boat fired without warning

Amena Bakr Reuters

8:12 a.m. CDT, July 17, 2012

DUBAI (Reuters) - Indian fishermen who survived a hail of gunfire from a U.S. navy boat off the coast of the United Arab Emirates disputed U.S. claims that their boat drew fire after ignoring warnings to steer clear of the American vessel.

One Indian was killed and three others injured on Monday when the USNS Rappahannock, a refueling ship, fired on the fishing vessel, which the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet said approached at high speed and ignored repeated warnings.

The incident highlighted the potential for a rapid escalation of tensions in Gulf waters, where U.S. forces are expanding their presence as Washington ramps up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program.

The fishermen, hospitalized with gunshot wounds after the incident near Dubai's Jebel Ali port, said on Tuesday that they received no warning before the U.S. craft opened fire, and that their craft had attempted to avoid any contact with it.

"We had no warning at all from the ship, we were speeding up to try and go around them and then suddenly we got fired at," 28-year-old Muthu Muniraj told Reuters from hospital, his legs punctured by the rounds of the U.S. craft's .50-caliber gun.

"We know warning signs and sounds and there were none; it was very sudden. My friend was killed, he's gone. I don't understand what happened."

A Fifth Fleet spokesman, Lt. Greg Raelson, asked whether the identification of the craft as a fishing boat made the threat cited by the Navy less likely, said an internal inquiry into the incident had not finished.

"Non-lethal measures were taken while attempting to signal the vessel," he said, adding that the fishing craft did not respond. "That was when the security team fired rounds from the .50-caliber ... Our ships have an inherent right to self-defense against lethal threats."

The United States has been particularly wary of attacks on its ships since two al Qaeda suicide bombers rammed an explosives-laden boat into the USS Cole in 2000, blowing a massive hole in its side and killing 17 U.S. sailors.

In Monday's incident, other members of the boat's crew, which consisted of six Indians and two Emiratis, said their boat had come under fire as it returned from trawling in waters off Jebel Ali.

"We were fishing and then on the way back they started shooting at us, so many shots, like a storm," said 35-year-old Muthu Kannan, who had a gunshot wound to the abdomen and a lower leg wired into place with metal rods.

"This is not the first time for us to go out in the boat and we all know what a warning is," said 26-year-old Pandu Sanadhan. "All I can remember is a lot of shooting."

ASSURANCES

An Indian government spokesman said he had assurances that Washington would provide a full account of the incident, and the Indian foreign ministry said it had no position on the issue of whether the fisherman were warned before the shooting.

But in the UAE, Indian ambassador M.K Lokesh told Reuters after meeting with the fishermen: "Obviously if they were warned they would not go close to such a big vessel. Even if shots were fired in the air, these fishermen would have moved away."

Asked if the Indian government would press for legal charges to be lodged against the U.S. sailors involved, he said: "We have to wait for the inquiry to be completed by the Dubai police before we move any further. But we are pushing for quick completion for the investigations."

Some Indian media appeared to blame the United States for the incident; one television channel ran headlines reading "Murder on the High Seas" and "No Regret, No Apology from America". In a statement, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi expressed its condolences to the families of the boat's crew.

Iran said the incident threatened to further destabilize a region already shaken by the international dispute over Tehran's nuclear program, which Washington and its allies believe is geared to make bombs.

Tehran denies it is seeking nuclear weapons and has repeatedly threatened to close the Gulf's outlet, the Strait of Hormuz through which 40 percent of the world's sea-borne oil exports are carried, if threatened over its nuclear plans.

"We have announced time and again that the presence of foreign forces can be a threat to regional security," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said during a news conference broadcast on state television.

The U.S. Navy said in February that Iran had built up its naval forces in the Gulf and prepared boats that could be used in suicide attacks.

"They have increased the number of submarines ... they increased the number of fast attack craft," said Vice Admiral Mark Fox, commander of U.S. naval forces in the region.

"Some of the small boats have been outfitted with a large warhead that could be used as a suicide explosive device. The Iranians have a large mine inventory."

(Additional reporting by Praveen Menon and Marcus George in Dubai and Ross Colvin in New Delhi; Writing by Joseph Logan; Editing by Myra MacDonald and Peter Graff)

Military recruiters intentionally lie to get kids to join the military????

Source

Veterans feeling shorted by Army recruiters

Money promised for college turned out to be far less

by Mary Beth Marklein, and Polina Marinova - Jul. 17, 2012 10:52 PM

USA Today

At the time, the deal seemed irresistible to Eric Hickam: Give six years to the Army, a recruiter told him in 2003, and you can get a $50,000 "kicker" -- the Army College Fund.

But when his payments started coming last fall, his first year at Columbia University, the amount fell far short of what Hickam had anticipated. He thought the college fund was a bonus on top of his GI Bill, worth about $35,000 at the time. The Army says the $50,000 figure was a total of all benefits. Last month, it denied Hickam's appeal seeking $50,000 more than what he's receiving for his GI Bill.

Hickam is one in a new wave of veterans who are discovering that their Army College Fund is worth far less than they thought when they enlisted. The Army has acknowledged, in at least 91 cases, that enlistment agreements involving the fund were "blatantly misleading" for more than a decade, a review of publicly available military records show.

Even so, it denied appeals from veterans who felt misled. With help from Congress, which in 2009 created a one-year opportunity for veterans to seek relief, the Army paid out $2.18 million to 86 applicants, or about $25,000 each. But the Army has since denied additional appeals. And no one knows how many of nearly 140,000 young men and women who signed up for the Army College Fund between April 1, 1993, and Sept. 30, 2004, either have given up or have yet to discover the discrepancy.

"It's sad that it takes an act of Congress to provide Army student veterans with their rightfully earned benefits," said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America.

Obama isn't a big enough war monger to make Ryan Zinke happy???

Source

Retired member of SEAL Team 6 launches anti-Obama PAC

By Susan Walsh, AP

The group, Special Operations for America, filed paperwork Monday with the Federal Election Commission. It is headed by retired Navy SEAL Commander Ryan Zinke. During his 23-year career, Zinke spent time in the Navy's elite SEAL Team 6, the same team that killed Osama bin Laden in a commando raid last year.

Zinke said he and other members of the special operations community are outraged that SEAL Team 6 was identified as the commando unit that carried out the raid, saying it put its members and their families at risk. Zinke said he believes the president has politicized his role as commander in chief to win re-election.

"Who was it at risk?" he said. "Was it the president? Or was it the young SEAL with the wife and kid at home? That's the arrogance."

Zinke, a Republican state senator from Montana, said the group also objects to deep military cuts and increases in health care costs to veterans. While he agreed there's room for cuts in military spending, he said the $1.1 trillion in cuts over 10 years that could start at the end of the year are too deep.

Officials with the group claim membership is in the "hundreds" and growing, although there is no way to confirm the number. And while spokesman Scott Hommel said the group is in negotiations with donors and is aiming for a budget of $10 million, records indicate it currently has assets of only $60.

Special Operations for America is registered as a 527 group, and it can take unlimited amounts of money from contributors. Whatever money the organization eventually raises, Hommel said, would be used to air ads in swing states targeted on veterans issues.

Rob Diamond, the national veterans and military families vote director for the Obama campaign, said the president "has their backs" when it comes to veterans and military families, and the president's record is a "stark contrast" to Mitt Romney's. He said Romney has refused to outline plans for veterans, has suggested that health services provided by Veterans Affairs be privatized and has failed to put forth a specific jobs proposal to get veterans back to work. News from On Politics

"Even worse, his reckless and naïve statements about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show that he would prefer our servicemen and women remain overseas, indefinitely fighting in wars he has no strategy to lead and no plan to end," Diamond said in a statement.

But Benjamin Smith, who spent six years as a SEAL, said he is upset by the level of detail that emerged about the bin Laden operation. Special operations personnel have a mystique that depends on secrecy, and details about the use of stealth helicopters and other information that leaked about the operation run counter to the way they conduct themselves.

"That right there to any operator is blasphemy," said Smith, 36, of Wilmington, N.C. "It's insulting. It made me sick to my stomach."

Not all members of the new super PAC are veterans, Zinke said. Members are "people who have been successful on the battlefield or in business." Its board includes former Republican Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana and former Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, and it has ties to the conservative groups Stand Up for America and Veterans for a Strong America.

"It's a good group of guys, and they're going to come out swinging," said Joel Arends, an Iraq Army veteran and chairman of Veterans for a Strong America.

But Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics said there's debate over how much influence these types of groups have in presidential elections.

Sabato thinks macro issues drive presidential elections, issues such as the economy, war and peace and scandals. In this election, the campaigns for Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney have been competently run so far, he said.

Still, polls generally give Romney an edge with veterans, he said, and such groups can have an effect on the margins. But they aren't the deciding forces.

"I don't think it will be one of the things we'll cite after the election's over," he said.

Contributing: Ellis also reports for the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Freedom Fighters 1 - TSA Thugs 0

Not Guilty - Man who stripped at airport to protest TSA thugs

Source

Man who stripped to protest TSA before San Jose flight not guilty of indecent exposure

By Mark Gomez mgomez@mercurynews.com

Posted: 07/19/2012 05:45:15 AM PDT

A Portland, Ore. man who stripped naked before a flight to Silicon Valley to protest a TSA security screening at Portland International Airport was found not guilty Wednesday of a misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure.

A judge in Oregon ruled that John Brennan's act of removing his clothing on April 17 in protest of the security screening was an act of protest and protected speech.

Brennan, 50, was arrested April 17 on suspicion of indecent exposure and disorderly conduct after removing his clothes to prove that even though he had tested positive for nitrates on his clothing he wasn't carrying explosives.

Brennan was in line at 5:35 p.m. for an Alaska Airlines flight to San Jose when he got into his birthday suit "as a form of protest against TSA screeners who he felt were harassing him," according to a police incident report obtained by The (Portland) Oregonian newspaper.

However, Brennan previously told this newspaper he did not feel harassed by the TSA workers; instead, he was protesting the pat-down process.

"They are just doing their job and as a citizen of the U.S. I'm doing my job to protect my constitutional rights to privacy, " Brennan, a Pacific Grove native, said in a telephone interview with this newspaper. "The TSA had already violated my privacy by doing a pat-down and being pulled out of the line. It's stripping me of any dignity.

The indecent exposure ordinance states: "It is unlawful for any person to expose his or her genitalia while in a public place, if the public place is open or available to persons of the opposite sex." However, a prior Oregon Court of Appeals decision effectively limits the ordinance to prohibit only public nudity that is "not intended as a protected symbolic or communicative act."

Brennan said he had declined to walk through a new scanning device at the airport. So Transportation Security Administration workers patted him down, put on gloves and wiped his clothing to test for explosive. He said he tested positive for nitrates, which he knew was an explosive ingredient because of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Brennan said the Oregon state Supreme Court has ruled that nudity is protected speech, and he disrobed with the idea that he was not breaking any laws. Brennan figured he'd be allowed to board his flight after proving he was not carrying a bomb.

"I know that public nudity is one of my forms of protest, " Brennan said in April. "And I carry that in my back pocket. That's how I have political speech. It gets people's attention."

Brennan said he was asked several times by screeners to not remove his clothes, and then to get dressed. When police arrived, he was again asked to get dressed.

Brennan said he refused.

"I stuck by my guns, " he said.

According to Brennan's social media sites, he provides clients "a broad base of technology skills and a high level of customer service to solve problems and increase independence."

Brennan said he has one major Silicon Valley client, but declined to name the company.

Obama lied about winning the war in Iraq???

Source

In Iraq’s deadliest day in 2 years, coordinated string of attacks nationwide kill at least 106

By Associated Press, Published: July 22

BAGHDAD — Bombings and shootings ripped across Iraq on Monday, killing at least 106 people in the deadliest day in more than two years. The coordinated attacks in 15 cities sent a chilling warning that al-Qaida is slowly resurging in the security vacuum created by a weak government in Baghdad and the departure of the U.S. military seven months ago.

Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq declared last week a new offensive aimed at sowing instability across the country.

Iraqi militants have kept up a steady drumbeat of deadly attacks since the U.S. pulled out in December, ending nearly a decade of war. They have sought to increase the chaos created by the deepening sectarian political crisis that pits Sunni and Kurdish leaders against Shiite political powers.

“Al-Qaida is trying to send a message that it is still strong and can choose the time and places to attack,” said Shiite lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili, a member of parliament’s security and defense committee. He said weaknesses in Iraq’s ability to gather intelligence about terror plots, or stop them despite security checkpoints has shown how toothless the government is in protecting its people.

Al-Zamili also raised the specter of al-Qaida infiltrating security forces. If these gaps are not closed quickly, he said, “the attacks and explosions will continue and al-Qaida will be stronger.”

In one brazen assault on Monday, three carloads of gunmen pulled up at an Iraqi army base early Monday near the northeastern town of Udaim and opened fire, killing 13 soldiers before escaping, two senior police officials said.

The deadliest attack, however, took place just north of Baghdad in the town of Taji, where a double bombing killed at least 41 people. The blasts were timed to hit as police rushed to help victims from a series of five explosions minutes earlier.

Monday’s violence bore most of the hallmarks of al-Qaida: the bombings and shootings all took place within a few hours of each other and struck mostly at security forces and government offices — favorite targets of the predominantly Sunni militants. And most of it happened in the capital and in northern areas the terror group used to control and where they now stand the best chance of regaining a foothold.

More than 200 people also were wounded in the onslaught Monday, Iraq’s bloodiest day since a string of nationwide attacks on May 10, 2010, killed at least 119 people. Spokesmen for Iraq’s government and Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could not be immediately reached for comment.

Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the country’s security, condemned the attacks, calling them a “flagrant violation” of the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It said security officials now planned to devise a new strategy to protect the public, but said complaints about the security gaps were “not useful.”

For years, al-Qaida in Iraq has been seeking to re-assert its might, although U.S. and Iraqi officials insist it is nowhere as strong as it was when the nation came to the brink of civil war between 2006 and 2008.

The militant group made a series of missteps shortly afterward — targeting civilians, imposing overly strict Islamic discipline, alienating tribal leaders — that undercut its support in Iraq’s Sunni communities and helped lead to the widespread defection of fighters to groups allied with the U.S. The flow of funding, arms and fighters slowed to a trickle, and al-Qaida in Iraq since has struggled, but failed, to command much power.

But the militant group’s local wing — known as the Islamic State of Iraq — is now seizing on the vacuum left by the Americans and Baghdad’s fragmented government.

Baghdad political analyst Hadi Jalo said al-Qaida in Iraq, as a Sunni group, feels emboldened by the success of the Sunni-dominated uprising in neighboring Syria against Damascus’ Alawite rulers. The Alawites are an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

“It is leading a sectarian war and Iraq is part of its war and ideology in this region,” Jalo said.

In a statement issued Saturday, the leader of al-Qaida’s affiliate in Iraq warned that the militant network is returning to strongholds from which it was driven from while the American military was here.

“The majority of the Sunnis in Iraq support al-Qaida and are waiting for its return,” Islamic State of Iraq leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said in the statement that was posted on a militant website.

The local wing of al-Qaida, known as the Islamic State of Iraq, has long been at odds with al-Qaida’s central leadership. The global network’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, has in the past criticized Iraq’s movement for targeting civilians. But earlier this year, al-Zawahri softened his stance, and included ISI militants in a network plea for fighters to join the Syrian uprising.

Previous al-Qaida offensives have failed to push the country into civil war, largely because Shiite militias in recent years have refused to be lured into the kind of tit-for-tat killings that marked Iraq’s descent six years ago. Additionally, for all its weaknesses, the Iraqi government now holds more authority than it did during those dark years, and, by and large, citizens have no desire to return down that path.

Still, the militant group appears to be banking on Iraq’s fragility in its campaign to throw it into permanent chaos. Sectarian tensions have risen due to a political crisis stemming from terror charges the Shiite-led government has filed against one of the country’s vice presidents, who is one of Iraq’s top Sunni officials. He says they are politically inspired.

Mohammed Munim, 35, was working at an Interior Ministry office that issues government ID cards to residents in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighborhood when a car exploded outside, killing 16 people.

“It was a thunderous explosion,” Munim said from his bed in the emergency room at Sadr City hospital. He was hit by shrapnel in his neck and back. “The only thing I remember was the smoke and fire, which was everywhere.”

Most of the cities and towns pounded by bombs Monday are located in Sunni-dominated areas that nonetheless include sizable pockets of ethnically- and religiously-mixed populations.

Attacks struck the Baghdad suburb of Hussainiya, northeastern Diyala province, five towns around Kirkuk and in the oil-rich city itself as well as the northern city of Mosul — a former al-Qaida stronghold, police said.

Only one of Monday’s attacks occurred in undisputed Shiite territory: a bomb in the southern town of Diwaniyah that police said killed three people and wounded 25.

All of the casualties were confirmed by police and health officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

___

Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes in Baghdad and Yahya Barzanji in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, contributed to this report.

A Spiteful New Policy at Guantánamo Bay

A Spiteful New Policy at Guantánamo Bay

Published: July 22, 2012

The Obama administration’s latest overuse of executive authority at Guantánamo Bay is a decision not to let lawyers visit clients in detention under terms that have been in place since 2004. Because these meetings pose little risk and would send a message about America’s adherence to the rule of law, the administration looks as if it is imperiously punishing detainees for their temerity in bringing legal challenges to their detention and losing.

In one case, the administration is saying that the Yemeni national Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail no longer has the right to meet with his counsel, David Remes, because his plea to be released was “terminated.” The Justice Department will only let them meet, it said in an e-mail to Mr. Remes, if he signs a new memorandum giving the government what Mr. Remes calls “absolute authority over access to counsel.”

A military officer would decide each time whether lawyer and client could meet. Mr. Remes could not use classified information he developed for the client without permission. He could not share what he learned from his client with other lawyers of detainees, as he could previously. He could not use it to help defend his client against criminal charges if the government brings them. He could not advocate for him with human rights groups.

Mr. Remes refused to sign. He and colleagues filed a motion this month with the federal magistrate handling disputes about lawyer-client visits at Guantánamo Bay. They argue that while their client is detained, “he retains the right to pursue any available legal avenues to obtain his release” and without “a full and fair opportunity to meet with counsel in a confidential privileged setting,” his “right to challenge his detention” means nothing.

Four years after the Supreme Court ruled that “the privilege of habeas corpus entitles the prisoner to a meaningful opportunity to demonstrate that he is being held pursuant to ‘the erroneous application or interpretation’ of relevant law,” the government may be calculating that it can decide what “meaningful” means.

But if the wars where detainees were captured have been to defend American interests, surely the country has an interest in an unequivocal commitment to the rule of law, including full legal representation for detainees.

Cops lying about "strong odor of marijuana" - Probably!!!!

Source

Traffic stop leads to drug-smuggling operation, police say

by Jackee Coe - Jul. 22, 2012 08:09 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Pima County sheriff's deputies busted a suspected drug-smuggling operation and seized more than 430 pounds of marijuana, officials said.

A Pima County deputy stopped a Ford Fusion about 11:20 p.m. Thursday in the 1200 block of North Sartillion Avenue in Ajo, about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, and noticed a strong odor of marijuana apparently coming from the car as he approached, Pima County Sheriff's Department spokesman Thomas Peine said.

The deputy called for backup and a K-9 unit to respond, he said, but an initial search didn't turn up any illegal drugs inside the car.

However, an indication from a dog pointed to a residence where the car had been stopped, Peine said, adding that deputies found a shed on the property that had a strong smell of marijuana.

Several people inside the home were detained, and, after obtaining a search warrant, deputies found 25 bales of marijuana with an overall weight of 430 pounds, Peine said.

One woman, later identified as 37-year-old Kristy Ann Fejarang-Blake, also had a small amount of methamphetamine, authorities said.

The driver of the Fusion, identified as Mashelle Womack, 39, admitted to transporting the drugs to her residence and storing them there and said a local 17-year-old boy helped her, Peine said.

Womack also said a man suspected of being in the country illegally, Jesus Tereso de Lopez-Zavala, who was found in the shed, was involved in the drug-smuggling scheme, Peine said.

Womack, Lopez-Zavala and the 17-year-old were arrested and each booked on suspicion of possession of marijuana for sale, transportation of marijuana for sale and possession of drug paraphernalia, Peine said.

Deputies also seized the Fusion.

Fejarang-Blake was arrested and booked on a count of possession of dangerous drugs.

Microsoft helps the police monitor your skype communications!!!

Things sure have changed. It pretty much always has been illegal for the police to steal your mail and read it or secretly tap your phone and listing to your calls.

But now days the police routinely listen in or read to any and all communications that use the internet, such as email, instant messaging and of course skype.

Source

Skype makes chats and user data more available to police

By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima, Published: July 25

Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.

Surveillance of the audio and video feeds remains impractical — even when courts issue warrants, say industry officials with direct knowledge of the matter. But that barrier could eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the world’s most popular forms of telecommunication.

The changes have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility from many activists and analysts.

The changes to online chats, which are written messages conveyed almost instantaneously between users, result in part from technical upgrades to Skype that were instituted to address outages and other stability issues since Microsoft bought the company last year. Officials of the United States and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the “going dark” problem.

Microsoft has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the issues would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s plans, who like several people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The company has “a long track record of working successfully with law enforcement here and internationally,” he added.

The changes, which give the authorities access to addresses and credit card numbers, have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility from many activists and analysts.

Authorities had for years complained that Skype’s encryption and other features made tracking drug lords, pedophiles and terrorists more difficult. Jihadis recommended the service on online forums. Police listening to traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear wary suspects say to one another, “Hey, let’s talk on Skype.”

Hacker groups and privacy experts have been speculating for months that Skype had changed its architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor, and many blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying with legal government requests in countries around the world.

“The issue is, to what extent are our communications being purpose-built to make surveillance easy?” said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a digital privacy group. “When you make it easy to do, law enforcement is going to want to use it more and more. If you build it, they will come.’’

Skype was slow to clarify the situation, issuing a statement recently that said, “As was true before the Microsoft acquisition, Skype cooperates with law enforcement agencies as is legally required and technically feasible.”

But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.

In the United States, such requests require a court order, though in other nations rules vary. Skype has more than 600 million users, with some in nearly every nation in the world. Political dissidents relied on it extensively during the Arab Spring to communicate with journalists, human rights workers and each other, in part because of its reputation for security.

Skype’s resistance to government monitoring, part of the company ethos when European engineers founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong encryption and a key technical feature: Skype calls connected computers directly rather than routing data through central servers, as many other Internet-based communication systems do. That makes it more difficult for law enforcement to intercept the call. The authorities long have been able to wiretap Skype calls to traditional phones.

The company created a law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay bought the company in 2005, putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S. law. The company was later sold to private investors before Microsoft bought it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.

The new ownership had at least an indirect role in the security changes. Skype has endured periodic outages, including a disastrous one in December 2010. Company officials concluded that a more robust system was needed if the company was going to reach its potential.

Industry officials said the resulting push for the creation of so-called “supernodes,” which routed some data through centralized servers, made greater cooperation with law enforcement authorities possible.

The access to personal information and online chats, which are kept in Skype’s systems for 30 days, remains short of what some law enforcement officials have requested.

The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.”

Hackers in recent years have demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate Skype, but it’s not clear how often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in June 2011 for “legal intercept” of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and video systems. It is also possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as well as voice and video by hacking into a user’s computer, doing an end run around encryptions.

“If someone wants to compromise a Skype communication, all they have to do is hack the endpoint — the person’s computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is very easy to do,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro, a cloud security company.

Some industry officials, however, say Skype loses some competitive edge in the increasingly crowded world of Internet-based communications systems if users no longer see it as more private than rival services.

“This is just making Skype like every other communication service, no better, no worse,” said one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Skype used to be very special because it really was locked up. Now it’s like Superman without his powers.”

No religious freedom for Muslims???

Source

Judge: Fort Hood suspect could be forcibly shaved

Associated Press

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — An Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood will be forcibly shaved if he doesn't remove his beard himself, a judge said Wednesday.

Maj. Nidal Hasan appeared in court Wednesday sporting a beard as he did during a court appearance last month. The beard violates Army regulations, but Hasan said it is an expression of his Muslim faith.

The judge, Col. Gregory Gross, held Hasan in contempt of court for keeping the beard and fined him $1,000. Fort Hood spokesman Chris Haug said Gross gave Hasan the choice to shave on his own or be forcibly shaved sometime before his court-martial begins Aug. 20.

Hasan again refused to shave and watched the rest of the day's hearing outside the courtroom.

Hasan, 41, is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the November 2009 massacre, the worst shooting incident on a U.S. military post. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

Until last month, he had been clean-shaven every time he attended court.

But since Hasan grew a beard, he and one of his attorneys have watched the pretrial hearings on closed-circuit television in a trailer near the courthouse. He refuses to shave, and Gross has indicated that Hasan might have to watch the court-martial from the trailer as well.

But on Wednesday, Gross said he wanted Hasan in the courtroom to prevent a possible appeal on the issue if Hasan is convicted.

Hasan's defense attorneys argued that he had not shaved in observance of the holy Islamic month of Ramadan. Ramadan is expected to end just before the court-martial starts.

Also Wednesday, Gross said he would review a copy of a new FBI report on the shootings. The report, made public last week, includes emails Hasan sent to Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamic cleric killed in Yemen last year by a drone strike.

The emails range from rambling messages about supporting terrorists and U.S. soldiers killing comrades in the name of Islam to questions about whether al-Awlaki could help him find a suitable wife. The emails attracted the attention of FBI and anti-terrorism task force agents in December 2008.

But authorities did not pursue a case against Hasan, according to the report, due to a series of gaps and miscommunication errors.

Man who tweeted airport bomb 'joke' wins appeal

Man who tweeted airport bomb 'joke' wins appeal

AFPAFP –

A Twitter user won his appeal against conviction Friday for sending a message that he was going to blow up an airport in northern England, which he said was a joke.

Paul Chambers tapped out his message on the social networking site in frustration after heavy snow at Robin Hood Airport in South Yorkshire in January 2010 threatened his plans to fly to Ireland.

He wrote to his 600 followers: "Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get... (it) together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

A week later, Chambers, now 28, was arrested. In May that year, magistrates in Doncaster fined him £385 and ordered him to pay £600 costs for sending "a message of a menacing nature."

An initial appeal failed but on Friday, judges at the High Court in London ruled that the conviction should be quashed.

Chambers spoke of his relief at the decision in a case which has attracted support for him from celebrities including broadcaster Stephen Fry.

"I am relieved, vindicated -- it is ridiculous it ever got this far," he said.

"I want to thank everyone who has helped, including everyone on Twitter."

His lawyer John Cooper had previously told judges in the case it was obvious the tweet, sent by someone who had not disguised his identity, was a joke not related to terrorism.

Cooper added: "If that be the case, and I don't mean to be flippant, John Betjeman would be concerned when he said: 'Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough', or Shakespeare when he said: 'Let's kill all the lawyers.'"

Chambers's name was trending on Twitter in the wake of the ruling.

Obama: $70M in new military aid to Israe

Source

Obama: $70M in new military aid to Israel (as Romney visits)

By MANDEL NGAN, AFP/Getty Images

President Obama said today that the U.S. is giving $70 million more in military aid to Israel, just as Republican opponent Mitt Romney prepares to visit the nation.

The money will help Israel speed up production of a missile defense system known as Iron Dome, officials said.

"We are standing by our friends in Israel when it comes to these kinds of attacks," Obama told reporters said in the Oval Office .

The president spoke before signing the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that he said "underscores our unshakeable commitment to Israel's security."

Romney has criticized Obama's commitment to Israel, one of the backdrops of the GOP's candidate's foreign trip this week to that country as well as Great Britain and Poland.

Campaign spokesman Ryan Williams said Romney is happy to see improved security cooperation with Israel, but the new legislation doesn't go far enough.

"Unfortunately," Williams said, "this bill does nothing to address yesterday's evasiveness from the White House on whether President Obama recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which raised doubt about the President's commitment to our closest ally in the region."

As we reported earlier today, the Obama administration has been shadowing Romney's trip.

Yesterday, the administration praised London's preparation for the London Olympics, in contrast to a critique by Romney.

The Pentagon also issued a statement about enhanced U.S. military cooperation with Poland.

Sounds like American wants to start a war in the Persian Gulf.

Iran bolsters retaliation capability in Persian Gulf, experts say

By Joby Warrick, Published: July 26

Iran is rapidly gaining new capabilities to strike at U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf, amassing an arsenal of sophisticated anti-ship missiles while expanding its fleet of fast-attack boats and submarines, U.S. and Middle Eastern analysts say.

The new systems, many of them developed with foreign assistance, are giving Iran’s commanders new confidence that they could quickly damage or destroy U.S. ships if hostilities erupt, the officials say.

Although U.S. Navy officials are convinced that they would prevail in a fight, Iran’s advances have fueled concerns about U.S. vulnerabilities during the opening hours of a conflict in the gulf.

Increasingly accurate short-range missiles — combined with Iran’s use of “swarm” tactics involving hundreds of heavily armed patrol boats — could strain the defensive capabilities of even the most modern U.S. ships, current and former military analysts say.

In recent weeks, as nuclear talks with world powers have faltered and tensions have risen, Iran has repeated threats to shut down shipping in the oil-rich gulf region. Its leaders also have warned of massive retaliation for any attacks on its nuclear facilities, which the United States believes are civilian covers for an Iranian drive to acquire a nuclear-weapons capability.

Last week, Iran’s Foreign Ministry declared that the presence of U.S. warships in the gulf constituted a “real threat” to the region’s security.

Pentagon officials have responded by sending more ships, urged on by Congress as well as U.S. allies in the region. This month, the Navy announced that it would deploy the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis to the Middle East four months ahead of schedule. The shift will keep two carriers in the gulf region.

The United States also has announced new military exercises in the region, including a mine-sweeping drill in the gulf, and has moved to add new radar stations and land-based missile-defense batteries in Qatar.

Assessing the risks

The likelihood that Iran would risk an all-out attack on a vastly superior U.S. fleet is judged to be small. But Iranian leaders could decide to launch a limited strike if Israel or the United States bombed the country’s nuclear facilities. Analysts also cautioned that a conflict could be sparked by an Iranian attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow passage through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes from the Persian Gulf into open seas — in retaliation for international economic sanctions.

In either scenario, Iran’s ability to inflict significant damage is substantially greater than it was a decade ago. A Pentagon study in April warned that Iran had made gains in the “lethality and effectiveness” of its arsenal. The Pentagon declined to comment for this article.

Iran’s increased power to retaliate has led some military experts to question the wisdom of deploying aircraft carriers and other expensive warships to the gulf if a conflict appears imminent.

A 2009 study prepared for the Naval War College warns of Iran’s increasing ability to “execute a massive naval ambush” in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway dotted with small islands and inlets and perfectly suited for the kind of asymmetric warfare preferred by Iran’s commanders.

If the U.S. chooses to station warships in the Strait of Hormuz during the buildup to conflict, it cedes the decision of when to fight and allows the fight to begin in the most advantageous place for Iran,” wrote the study’s author, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Colin Boynton. “This could lead to a devastating first salvo on U.S. Navy warships, which would most likely be operating under restrictive rules of engagement.”

Since 2009, analysts say, Iran has added defensive and offensive capabilities. Some of them have been on display in recent months in a succession of military drills, including a missile exercise in early July dubbed Great Prophet 7. The exercise included a demonstration of Iran’s newly deployed Khalid Farzh anti-ship missile, which has an internal guidance system, a powerful 1,400-pound warhead and a range of 180 miles.

Iran’s arsenal already included a variety of anti-ship missiles such as the Chinese-made Silkworm. More recently, Iran has boasted of progress in developing high-speed torpedoes based on Russian designs. Such claims are often exaggerated, but the April Pentagon assessment noted that Iran’s arsenal now includes ballistic missiles with “seekers” that enable them to maneuver toward ships during flight.

Modern U.S. warships are equipped with multiple defense systems, such as the ship-based Aegis missile shield. But Iran has sought to neutralize the U.S. technological advantage by honing an ability to strike from multiple directions at once. The emerging strategy relies not only on mobile missile launchers but also on new mini-submarines, helicopters and hundreds of heavily armed small boats known as fast-attack craft.

These highly maneuverable small boats, some barely as long as a subway car, have become a cornerstone of Iran’s strategy for defending the gulf against a much larger adversary. The vessels can rapidly deploy Iran’s estimated 2,000 anti-ship mines or mass in groups to strike large warships from multiple sides at once, like a cloud of wasps attacking much larger prey.

A Middle Eastern intelligence official who helps coordinate strategy for the gulf with U.S. counterparts said some Navy ships could find themselves in a “360-degree threat environment,” simultaneously in the cross hairs of adversaries on land, in the air, at sea and even underwater.

“This is the scenario that is giving people nightmares,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing strategy for defending against a possible Iranian attack.

The Navy has ordered new systems for defending against small-boat “swarms,” including ship-launched unmanned aerial vehicles and special missiles and artillery rounds for use against fast-attack craft. But many of the new defenses will not be deployed for several months, said Michael Eisenstadt, a former military adviser to the Pentagon and the State Department.

“We’re behind and we’re catching up,” Eisenstadt said. “But if there’s a conflict in the near term, we may not be completely ready.” [Let me get this straight! The American Empire spends more on their miliary then all the other countries of the world combined spend on their military and Michael Eisenstadt says "We’re behind"]

U.S. forces would probably recover quickly from any early losses, but Iranian leaders could claim a psychological victory if the world’s media carried images of burning U.S. warships in the gulf, Eisenstadt said. Al-Qaeda landed a similar blow in 2000 when suicide bombers on a small boat heavily damaged the destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, an attack that killed 17 sailors and wounded nearly 40 others.

“A lot of Iranian ships would be at the bottom of the gulf, but [Iran] would be able to point to a victory,” Eisenstadt said. “The outcome would never be in doubt when you’re dealing with the most powerful military in the world. But in their minds they would have shown the world that if you mess with us, you’ll pay a heavy price.”

The Iranian naval buildup is described by U.S. officials as part of an effort by the Islamic Republic to bolster its military credibility in the region.

The Pentagon’s April assessment said Iran was making steady progress in developing ballistic missiles capable of striking targets in Israel and beyond. It also said Tehran was enhancing its well-established capacity to launch terrorist attacks using surrogates such as Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militia movement that operates a network of cells around the world.

U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have linked Iran and Hezbollah to a string of assassination attempts and terrorist attacks on three continents in the past six months — from the foiled plot to kill a Saudi diplomat in Washington last fall to the deadly bombing of a tour bus filled with Israelis last week in Bulgaria. Current and former U.S. officials say more attacks are likely if Israel launches a preemptive strike on Iran’s uranium-enrichment plants.

“Iran has the capacity to attack, from Argentina to Venezuela, in Asia, in Europe and throughout the Middle East,” Danielle Pletka, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said Wednesday in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It seems naïve to believe it does not have the capacity to launch attacks in the United States.”

The arms buildup in the gulf comes as Israeli officials continue to weigh an airstrike that many experts believe would ignite a larger conflict. A stream of Obama administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, have visited Israel in recent weeks to lobby against a unilateral attack. Middle East experts say that Israel has not decided to attack but that the risk of an Israeli strike is rising as hopes of a diplomatic settlement to the nuclear crisis evaporate.

David Makovsky, a Middle East expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said after discussions with top Israeli officials that he assessed the chances of a strike at “50-50 . . . before the U.S. elections” in November. “There’s this feeling that Israel’s window is closing.”

U.S. ships, meanwhile, continue steaming toward the gulf as the Obama administration seeks to reassure allies in the region and discourage Iran from moving to block the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. and Middle Eastern officials acknowledge that deployments carry inherent risk, but they say there are no good alternatives.

“It is a dilemma,” the Middle East intelligence official said. “When the Navy ships are in the strait, they are vulnerable to attack. But if you were to take them away, the gulf countries would feel more vulnerable. And already they feel very, very vulnerable.”

American Empire to invade Mali???

Source

Obama administration weighs intervention in Mali

July 27, 2012 | 7:39 am

ASPEN, Colo. — The Obama administration is considering U.S. intervention to pressure Al Qaeda-inspired militants who have seized territory in the African nation of Mali.

Michael Sheehan, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for special operations, was asked Thursday whether the United States would use targeted strikes or special operations troops to help the Malian government fight the militants.

“All options are being considered” against “a looming threat,” Sheehan said. “There have been no decisions.”

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, a gathering of current and former national security officials, Sheehan said there was deep concern about the militants’ activities in northern Mali, which has fallen out of the control of Mali’s coup-led government in Bamako, the capital.

“We cannot allow Al Qaeda to sit in ungoverned places,” Sheehan said of northern Mali. In March, a military coup ousted President Amadou Toumani Toure. A junta handed power to an interim government, but the junta's leaders, including Capt. Amadou Sanogo, still wield influence. The new government has been accused of brutal repression. The U.S. removed military trainers from Mali after the coup.

“Mali is a difficult situation because it starts with the government in Bamako,” Sheehan said. “We have to find a way to move forward with the government first, and I think we need to start to accelerate that effort.”

Sheehan declined to say what steps the U.S. might take, but he cited another African country beset by an Al Qaeda affiliate, Somalia, as a success story. The U.S. has supported Kenyan and Ethiopian incursions into Somalia that have pushed back Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda-linked militia, he said.

The U.S. is known to carry out drone strikes in Somalia.

Mali’s military said Thursday it would welcome a West African military intervention force to help recapture the north, where some militants are enforcing strict Islamic law.

Pakistan unrelenting in demanding drone strike end

Source

Pakistan unrelenting in demanding drone strike end

Associated Press

By KIMBERLY DOZIER | Associated Press

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Pakistan's ambassador to the United States says her country will not relent from demanding that the CIA end its drone strikes.

In a debate with White House war adviser Douglas Lute at the Aspen Security Forum, Sherry Rehman said drone attacks have damaged al-Qaida but are now only serving to recruit new militants.

"I am not saying drones have not assisted in the war against terror, but they have diminishing rate of returns," Rehman said by video teleconference from Washington.

With Pakistan's spy chief, Lt. Gen. Zaheerul Islam, expected to hold his first meeting with CIA Director David Petraeus at CIA headquarters in Virginia next week, the ambassador said, "We will seek an end to drone strikes and there will be no compromise on that."

Lute would not comment on the drone program. U.S. officials have said privately that it will continue because Pakistan has proved incapable or unwilling to target militants the U.S. considers dangerous. [So if Pakistan doesn't murder and kill it's citizens the American Empire doesn't like the US thinks it can kill them with drone strikes???]

A long-sought U.S. apology to Pakistan over a deadly border incident cleared the way to restart counterterrorism talks. In addition to the end to drone strikes, Pakistani officials say they will ask the U.S. to feed intelligence gathered by the pilotless aircraft to Pakistani jets and ground forces so they can target militants.

While neither side expects much progress, officials from both countries see the return to dialogue as a chance to repair a relationship dented by a series of incidents that damaged trust on both sides. U.S. officials remain angry over what they say is Pakistan's support of Taliban groups, including the militant Haqqani network, that the U.S. contends are taking shelter in Pakistan's tribal areas and attack troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

But Rehman dismissed as "outrageous" the claim that Pakistan is harboring al-Qaida or other militants who intend to harm the U.S. She said Pakistan's army was working hard to combat the militants, including reporting 52 times to NATO in recent months when militants were spotted crossing into Afghan territory.

"Pakistan is maxed out on the international border with Afghanistan," she said.

"Sovereignty has privileges but also comes with responsibilities," countered Lute who called for Pakistan to step up its efforts and to cease "hedging its bets" by supporting the Afghan Taliban.

The two did agree, however, that Pakistan could help broker an eventual peace deal with the Taliban.

When asked why the Taliban would surrender ahead of the 2014 drawdown of U.S. troops, Lute said a recent security agreement with Afghanistan ensures a long-term U.S. commitment to Afghan security.

"The agreement we've made with Afghanistan signals to Taliban that they can't wait us out," Lute said. "If they want another decade of this, to get hammered every day and every night," U.S. and Afghan forces can provide.

If the Taliban are willing to disarm and respect the laws of the Afghan government, "the door will remain open to negotiation," Lute said.

A major grievance for Pakistan remains last year's U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. The operation was conducted without Pakistan's permission.

Rehman defended Pakistan's arrest of Dr. Shakil Afridi, who has been sentenced to more than three decades in prison for aiding the CIA in tracking down bin Laden. Afridi conducted a vaccine program in the military town where the terrorist mastermind turned out to be hiding.

U.S. lawmakers have threatened to halt millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan unless Afridi is released, in recognition of his contribution. Afridi is appealing his sentence.

"He had no clue he was looking for Osama bin Laden," Rehman countered. "He was contracting with a foreign intelligence agency."

She added that Afridi's actions put thousands of children at risk because some vaccine programs had to be ended after Pakistani aid workers were targeted by the Taliban.

___

Online:

Aspen Security Forum: http://aspensecurityforum.org

___

Dozier can be followed on Twitter (at)kimberlydozier

4 more years of war with Mitt Romney???

Source

Romney talks tough about Iran

by Philip Rucker - Jul. 30, 2012 12:07 AM

Washington Post

JERUSALEM - Mitt Romney stepped forcefully into a diplomatic stalemate here Sunday by calling on the United States and Israel to use "any and all measures" to lead the effort to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

In a muscular speech delivered from a balcony overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Romney said the United States would support Israel's efforts to defend itself. But the Republican presidential hopeful stopped short of saying he would support a unilateral military strike by Israel against Iran to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear capability.

"We must not delude ourselves into thinking that containment is an option," Romney said. "We must lead the effort to prevent Iran from building and possessing nuclear-weapons capability. We should employ any and all measures to dissuade the Iranian regime from its nuclear course, and it is our fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures will do so.

"In the final analysis, of course, no option should be excluded," Romney continued. "We recognize Israel's right to defend itself, and that it is right for America to stand with you."

The presidential candidate delivered his address after a series of back-to-back meetings with top Israeli and Palestinian officials, network-television interviews and a surprise visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, one of Judaism's holiest religious sites.

The former Massachusetts governor outlined an aggressive world view in his public statements in Israel on Sunday, but he did not offer any new policy specifics. There is little daylight between his policy approach to Iran and the policies President Barack Obama has pursued in office, although Romney used more heated rhetoric to describe the Iranian threat.

"It is sometimes said that those who are the most committed to stopping the Iranian regime from securing nuclear weapons are reckless and provocative and inviting war. The opposite is true. We are the true peacemakers," he said.

"Make no mistake, the ayatollahs in Iran are testing our moral defenses," Romney said. "They want to know who will object and who will look the other way. We will not look away nor will our country ever look away from our passion and commitment to Israel."

Romney added, "We have a solemn duty and a moral imperative to deny Iran's leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions."

The security of Israel, Romney said, "is in the vital national-security interest of the United States."

Romney's speech came hours after one of his senior foreign-policy advisers, Dan Senor, told reporters that Romney would support Israel's right to launch a unilateral military strike against Iran.

"It is an existential threat and we in the West partnering with Israel should do everything we can from stopping Iran from developing that weapons capability," Senor said. "And if Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision."

Senor cautioned that Romney is not "advocating" military action but believes it should be an option.

The Obama administration has urged the Israelis to be patient while international sanctions against Iran are given time to work, but has assured Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel has the right to act in its own national-security interests.

Some in the administration fear that an Israeli strike against Iran could ignite a regional war.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak issued a statement Saturday thanking Obama after he signed an act upgrading security ties with Israel, but there was no such declaration by Netanyahu. Obama's step was widely seen as an attempt to parry Romney's visit here.

Romney has pledged not to criticize Obama while he is outside the United States, and said in an interview with CBS News, "I think because I'm on foreign soil I don't want to be creating new foreign policy for my country or in any way to distance myself in the foreign policy of our nation. But we respect the right of a nation to defend itself."

On Sunday morning, a senior Israeli official denied a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Sunday that Obama's national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, had briefed Netanyahu during a recent visit on American plans for a possible attack on Iran.

The report, which cited an unnamed senior American official, coincided with the start of Romney's meetings here and appeared to underline Obama's readiness to use military force.

"Nothing in the article is correct," said the Israeli official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The report came at the start of a full day of official meetings designed for Romney to deepen his ties with Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, a friend of Romney's since they worked together as business consultants in the 1970s.

Romney met with Netanyahu Sunday morning at the prime minister's Jerusalem offices.

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and a Netanyahu adviser who attended the meeting with Romney, said Romney did not repeat past criticisms of Obama's policies toward Israel or try to lay out a Middle East policy different from that of the current administration.

Losing the Afghan war $100 million dollars at a time.

U.S. construction projects in Afghanistan challenged by inspector general’s report

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Published: July 29

A U.S. initiative to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on construction projects in Afghanistan, originally pitched as a vital tool in the military campaign against the Taliban, is running so far behind schedule that it will not yield benefits until most U.S. combat forces have departed the country, according to a government inspection report to be released Monday.

The report, by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, also concludes that the Afghan government will not have the money or skill to maintain many of the projects, creating an “expectations gap” among the population that could harm overall stabilization efforts.

“Implementing projects that the Afghan government is unable to sustain may be counter­productive” to the U.S. counterinsurgency mission, the inspector general wrote. “If goals are set and not achieved, both the U.S. and Afghan governments can lose the populace’s support.”

The study calls into question a fundamental premise of the U.S. strategy to counter the Taliban insurgency — that expensive new roads and power plants can be funded and constructed quickly enough to help turn the tide of war — and it poses a sobering, counterintuitive question for policymakers in Washington: whether the massive influx of American spending in Afghanistan is actually making problems worse.

Many U.S. military commanders, diplomats and reconstruction experts have long believed that large infrastructure projects were essential to fixing Iraq and Afghanistan. Now-retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former top commander in both wars who is now director of the CIA, used to say that cash was one of his most important weapons.

But the latest report adds new weight to the argument — voiced by independent development specialists and even a few government officials — that the United States attempted to build too much in a country with limited means to assume responsibility for those projects. All U.S. combat forces are expected to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Until now, most critiques have asserted only that the massive U.S. foreign assistance program has led to waste and fueled corruption. The new report goes further by suggesting that some projects may ultimately prove detrimental.

In a written response to the report, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said it was “speculative” for the inspector general to conclude that some of the projects would have adverse effects. The top Pentagon official responsible for Afghanistan called the report premature and insisted that the announcement of the projects, even though they have not been completed, has generated goodwill and excitement among the Afghan people.

The inspector general’s examination focuses on the Afghan Infrastructure Fund, which was authorized by Congress in 2010 in part to prevent the Defense Department from dipping into a discretionary account for military commanders to bankroll large projects. The infrastructure fund was supposed to allow the Defense and State departments to collaboratively plan and pool money for large infrastructure improvements aimed at supporting the U.S. counter­insurgency campaign.

Since then, Congress has poured $800 million into the fund and the State Department has committed about $1 billion of its funds to related infrastructure programs.

Among the projects criticized by the inspector general is a plan to use costly diesel generators to provide electricity to residents of Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, until the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers install a new hydropower turbine at a dam in the violence-plagued hills of neighboring Helmand province. Purchasing diesel to run the generators, which produce about 25 megawatts of electricity each — enough to power about 2,500 Afghan homes or small businesses — is projected to cost U.S. taxpayers about $220 million through 2013.

Senior U.S. commanders argued that increasing electricity through the “Kandahar Bridging Solution” would be an important part of the overall American military effort to beat back the Taliban in Kandahar province. Those commanders asserted that more power to operate lights, television sets and fans would please residents and lead many of them to throw their support behind the Afghan government.

But other civilian and military officials have questioned that logic. When U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl was the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Kandahar last year, he said he could not find any evidence that the additional electricity was yielding greater employment, stability or support for the government. “This is a bridge to nowhere,” he declared to his staff in 2011.

Back then, Dahl also noticed a disturbing disparity: The installation of the turbine at the dam, which will not occur for at least two more years, will produce significantly less power than the city receives from the generators. Since the Afghan government will not have the financial ability to buy diesel for the generators, that means the city’s power supply will inevitably ebb once the turbine is operational and U.S. funding for diesel ends.

That gap was seized upon by the inspector general. “While the Kandahar Bridging Solution may achieve some immediate [counter­insurgency] benefits because — as stated by USAID officials — ‘people like having their lights on,’ the U.S. government may be building an expectations gap that cannot be met in a timely manner,” the report states.

The inspector general’s report also questions whether a new $23 million road in Helmand province will have adverse effects because the Afghan government has not compensated landowners for the destruction of their property. In addition, the report reveals that four electricity projects — costing a total of more than $300 million from the infrastructure fund — have not yet been awarded to contractors, despite claims from the military and USAID that they will have important counterinsurgency benefits.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a frequent critic of Afghan reconstruction efforts, said the report raises fundamental questions about the strategic rationale of U.S. development programs in the war-torn nation. “There’s no data that shows these major projects have changed the security environment in the country,” she said. “We cannot just throw money at a country like this and expect it to have a good ending.”

In its response to the report, the U.S. Embassy defended the importance of large-scale development initiatives. “These critical infrastructure projects have signaled to Afghan populations the U.S. government’s long term commitment to Afghanistan.”

Although the United States has spent almost $90 billion on Afghan reconstruction and development over the past decade, such examinations traditionally had not been conducted by the special inspector general’s office, which was more interested in contracting waste and fraud. This report was approved by a new inspector, former federal prosecutor John F. Sopko, who took charge of the office this month. He has vowed to scrutinize how projects are conceptualized and designed, not just how they are implemented.

More than $200 million wasted on Iraq police training, audit says

Source

More than $200 million wasted on Iraq police training, audit says

July 30, 2012 | 11:56 am

The United States wasted more than $200 million on an Iraqi police-training program that has little backing on the ground, a new U.S. government audit released Monday found.

Training the Iraqi police was originally envisioned as the biggest single program run by the U.S. Department of State in the world, spanning five years and costing billions of dollars. But the program has been gutted as Iraqi officials show dimming interest. The U.S. slashed the number of advisors from 85 to 36 this month; it had once planned to have 350.

As Iraqi enthusiasm for the idea has flagged, the program has been downsized so much that the Baghdad Police College Annex -- built at an $108 million cost to help house the program -- will be closed. The U.S. also chipped in an additional $98 million to a Basra facility where training will be halted, making the money a “de facto waste,” the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found.

Only seven police advisors used the $98 million facility at the height of the training program. Government auditors questioned why millions were poured into costly construction projects without a written commitment to the program from the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

The inspector general “acknowledges that gaining Iraqi commitment to the police training program has been exceeding difficult. And the security situation has been worse than expected,” the report says. But the need for Iraqis to be firmly behind the projects had been emphasized over and over.

In a letter, Assistant Secretary of State Carol Z. Perez disputed the idea that the funds had been wasted, saying Iraqis will still use the Baghdad Police College Annex for training, the Associated Press reported. The U.S. had been assured that Iraq was committed to a streamlined version of the program, she said.

The report notes that State Department officials said they were surprised by the Iraqi disinterest because they had repeatedly met with Iraqi officials before the program began in October to share their ideas and ask for input. But as the training began, Iraqi officials and police questioned whether it was useful, faulting it as poorly organized and lacking leadership.

Some Iraqi officers were told not to go to trainings at the Baghdad Police College Annex or the U.S. Embassy for political reasons, the report says, as Iraqi officials tried to avoid being seen as overly dependent on the Americans. The results are “lukewarm relations between the Americans and the Iraqis,” the report says, citing an Iraqi official.

“I do believe that some of this was unpredictable,” said Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. As the U.S. scaled back its forces in a country trying to assert its own sovereignty, “the program began to stick out like a sore thumb.”

Iraqi officials flatly rejected more than a quarter of the meetings that police advisors requested and fewer than half happened. The report says Iraqi officials don’t want the sweeping training that the U.S. had envisioned but a much smaller program solely to hone technical and advanced policing skills.

The program has also been dogged by the worsening security in Baghdad. After American troops withdrew from Iraq in December, the advisors have had trouble traveling to meet with Iraqi police. Meetings at the Baghdad Police College were all but suspended between January and March as bomb attacks targeted Iraqi police. Security costs have chewed up a growing share of the budget.

Because the program was downsized but its funding kept flowing, the crimped initiative may be able to survive on the unspent money left over from past years, auditors say. The report recommends that the secretary of State account for all available funding and that Congress might want to push the department to assure lawmakers in writing that Iraqis want the program before more money is committed.

The U.S. government has spent roughly $8 billion to train, staff and equip Iraqi police since 2003, according to the report.

U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan at 1,935

This web site antiwar.com/casualties says 4,488 Americans died in the Iraq war.

Of course the real horror is the number of innocent civilians murdered by the American government in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Depending on which source you read those numbers are from 100,000 to in the millions.

Source

U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan at 1,935

Jul. 31, 2012 08:46 AM

Associated Press

As of Tuesday, July 31, 2012, at least 1,935 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count.

The AP count is five less than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Tuesday at 10 a.m. EDT.

At least 1,612 military service members have died in Afghanistan as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

Outside of Afghanistan, the department reports at least 118 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, 14 were the result of hostile action.

The AP count of total OEF casualties outside of Afghanistan is three fewer than the department's tally.

The Defense Department also counts three military civilian deaths.

Since the start of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, 17,024 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department.

The latest identifications reported by the military:

--Two marines died July 29 while conducting combat operations in Badghis province, Afghanistan; killed were: Gunnery Sgt. Jonathan W. Gifford, 34, of Palm Bay, Fla.; assigned to 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion, Camp Lejeune, N.C.; and Gunnery Sgt. Daniel J. Price, 27, of Holland, Mich.; assigned to 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, Camp Pendleton, Calif.

--Two soldiers died July 28 in Wardak province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered from enemy, small arms fire; they were assigned to the 630th Engineer Company, 7th Engineer Battalion, 10th Sustainment Brigade, Fort Drum, N.Y.; killed were: Sgt. 1st Class Bobby L. Estle, 38, of Lebanon, Ohio, and Pfc. Jose Oscar Belmontes, 28, of La Verne, Calif.

--Spc. Benjamin C. Pleitez, 25, of Turlock, Calif., died July 27, in Mazar E Sharif, Afghanistan; assigned to 1072nd Transportation Company, 746th Combat Support Battalion, 224th Sustainment Brigade, Van Nuys, Calif.

--Pfc. Theodore M. Glende, 23, of Rochester, N.Y., died July 27, in Kharwar, Logar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small-arms fire; assigned to the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Vicenza, Italy.

--Two soldiers died July 26 in Khakrez, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when they encountered an enemy improvised explosive device; they were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.; killed were: 1st Lt. Sean R. Jacobs, 23, of Redding, Calif., and Sgt. John E. Hansen, 41, of Austin, Texas.

-- Sgt. Justin M. Hansen, 26, of Traverse City, Mich., died July 24 while conducting combat operations in Badghis province, Afghanistan; assigned to 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

--Pfc. Adam C. Ross, 19, of Lyman, S.C., died July 24, in Wardak province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when he encountered small arms fire; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Vicenza, Italy.

--Sgt. Eric E. Williams, 27, of Murrieta, Calif., died July 23, in Pul-E Alam, Afghanistan; assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.

--Two soldiers died July 22 of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit in Pul-E Alam, Afghanistan, with an improvised explosive device; they were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Caserma Ederle, Italy; killed were: Spc. Justin L. Horsley, 21, of Palm Bay, Fla., and Pfc. Brenden N. Salazar, 20, of Chuluota, Fla.

--Two soldiers died July 22 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered from an enemy improvised explosive device; they were assigned to the 508th Special Troops Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.; killed were: Pfc. Julian L. Colvin, 21, of Birmingham, Ala., and Staff Sgt. Richard L. Berry, 27, of Scottsdale, Ariz.

Kangaroo court orders Iran to pay $6 billion!

Source

Iran, al-Qaida, Taliban told to pay $6B for 9/11

Jul. 31, 2012 07:15 AM

Associated Press

NEW YORK -- A U.S. judge has ordered al-Qaida, the Taliban and Iran to pay $6 billion to relatives of Sept. 11 victims for aiding in the 2001 terror attacks in New York.

The ruling is largely symbolic since it would be nearly impossible to collect any damages.

But plaintiff Ellen Saracini tells the Daily News that she is happy about Monday's ruling by Manhattan Federal Magistrate Judge Frank Maas. Her husband, Victor, was the captain of one of the two planes that struck the World Trade Center.

Last year, Judge George Daniels signed a default judgment on the lawsuit brought by family members of 47 victims. He found al-Qaida, the Taliban and Iran liable and asked the magistrate to determine damages.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denied any Iranian connection in the attacks.

"Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" the Obama version?

Source

Panetta, in Israel visit, stresses that U.S. military action against Iran remains an option

By Greg Jaffe, Updated: Wednesday, August 1, 7:30 AM

ASHKELON, Israel — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta stressed Wednesday that if economic sanctions do not compel Iran to end its nuclear program, the United States would have to consider military options to destroy it.

Panetta’s repeated emphasis on pursuing other options if diplomacy fails did not mark a change in policy but gave his remarks a harder edge than his previous statements.

Iran’s quest to possess nuclear technology: Iran said it has made advances in nuclear technology, citing new uranium enrichment centrifuges and domestically made reactor fuel.

His comments came amid deepening concern that Israel could launch a unilateral strike on Iran. They followed a series of visits to Israel by senior Obama administration officials, who are pressing the Israelis to give economic sanctions more time to persuade the Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions.

Panetta described the recently imposed economic sanctions as “the toughest Iran has ever faced” and insisted they were working. “The most effective way to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is for the international community to be united, proving to Iran that it will only make itself less secure if it continues to try to pursue a nuclear weapon,” he said.

The defense secretary’s statements also come as presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is making the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran a campaign issue. During his visit to Israel this week, Romney used sharp language, saying that “any and all measures” should be considered to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Panetta appeared with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak at a jointly funded U.S.-Israeli anti-rocket battery in southern Israel, then met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Even as Panetta emphasized the Obama administration’s deep opposition to Iran’s nuclear program and the United States’ close partnership with Israel, the differences in the American and Israeli views regarding the need for urgent military action were clear.

Barak told reporters that the likelihood of sanctions curbing Iranian nuclear ambitions is “very, extremely low” and suggested that the Iranians were stalling for time as they moved quickly to enrich the uranium they would need for a nuclear weapon.

“We have clearly something to lose by this stretch of time on which sanctions and diplomacy takes place because the Iranians are moving forward,” he said, standing next to Panetta.

Netanyahu reiterated that message in a brief statement after his meeting with Panetta. “However forceful our statements, they have not convinced Iran that we are serious about stopping them,” Netanyahu said. “Right now, the Iranian regime believes that the international community does not have the will to stop its nuclear program. This must change quickly, because the time to resolve this issue peacefully is running out.”

In remarks that appeared designed to increase pressure on the Iranians and reassure the Israelis, Panetta said repeatedly that the United States had developed military options to thwart the Iranian nuclear program if sanctions fail.

“We will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Period,” Panetta said after his meeting with Netanyahu. “And we will exert all options in the effort to ensure that that does not happen.” In his appearance with the Israeli defense minister, Panetta said it was his responsibility to “provide the president with a full range of options, including military options, should diplomacy fail.”

Unlike the U.S. military, the Israel Defense Forces do not have tankers capable of refueling warplanes in flight, nor is Israel’s arsenal of bunker-busting bombs thought to be as effective as that of the United States at taking out deeply buried targets. Those shortcomings could limit the effectiveness of any unilateral action by the Israelis against the Iranian nuclear program.

Panetta spent the morning touring an anti-rocket battery developed by the Israelis with the assistance of the United States and more than $200 million in U.S. aid. Last week, President Obama pledged an additional $70 million to help Israel bolster the Iron Dome system, which is designed to shoot down short-range rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. Panetta called the system a “game changer” for the Israelis and said it had shot down more than 80 percent of the rockets fired in recent months at Israeli cities.

The anti-rocket system would not be effective against longer-range Iranian missiles, which can be countered only with more sophisticated theater missile-defense systems.

A unilateral Israeli strike on the Iranian program would be likely to trigger large reprisal strikes by Iran against Israel and U.S. targets in the Middle East. There would be intense pressure on the Obama administration to provide for Israel’s defense.

Panetta’s quick tour of the Iron Dome system was designed to highlight the close partnership between Israel and the United States.

“This is the strongest alliance that we have . . . and we will continue to strengthen the military relationship,” Panetta said.

Government not liable for illegally tapping your phone???

Again I am sure that this is one of the reasons the Founders gave us the Second Amendment.

If the courts say that the government doesn't have to honor the 4th and 5th Amendments, do you really think the courts will say the government has to honor the 2nd Amendment?

Source

Appeals court overturns ruling, says government wiretapping was OK

August 7, 2012 | 12:46 pm

A federal appeals court Tuesday threw out a lawsuit by lawyers for an Islamic group that charged the federal government had illegally wiretapped them.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the government had legal immunity from the lawsuit filed by lawyers for Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now-defunct charity that federal agents said was a terrorist group.

The ruling overturns a 2010 decision by a San Francisco federal judge against the wiretapping program. That ruling awarded the group’s lawyers who had been wiretapped a total of $40,800 and required the government to pay Al-Haramain’s $2.5 million legal fees.

“This case effectively brings to an end the plaintiffs’ ongoing attempts to hold the executive branch responsible for intercepting telephone conversations without judicial authorization,” the 9th Circuit said.

The panel also affirmed a lower-court decision that FBI Director Robert Mueller could not be personally sued as a result of the surveillance.

In 2001, President George W. Bush authorized the government to monitor, without warrants, telephone calls and e-mails between Americans and possible foreign terrorists. Al-Haramain and its two lawyers sued, arguing that they had been wiretapped illegally.

Jon Eisenberg, who represented Al-Haramain’s lawyers, said the decision prevents citizens who have been wiretapped without a warrant from suing the government.

“There is no accountability,” Eisenberg said. “That is what is so distressful about this decision. It means that President Bush got away with it, and it means that President Obama will be able to get away with it and every president after him.”

The extent of government wiretapping “is a government secret, and the courts aren’t going to have anything to do with revealing those secrets,” Eisenberg said.

-- Maura Dolan in San Francisco

U.S. soldier in WikiLeaks case claiming harsh treatment

U.S. soldier in WikiLeaks case claiming harsh treatment

His superiors ordered it, documents say; lawyer wants all charges dismissed

by David Dishneau - Aug. 10, 2012 11:56 PM

Associated Press

HAGERSTOWN, Md. - A U.S. Army private charged in a massive leak of government secrets claims his harsh pretrial treatment during nine months in a military prison was directed from high up the chain of command and warrants dismissal of the entire case, according to documents his civilian lawyer released Friday.

The 110-page motion alleges Pfc. Bradley Manning developed a rash from being forced to sleep beneath a stiff, suicide-prevention blanket and suffered an anxiety attack due to harassment by guards. It repeats well-publicized claims that Manning was forced for several days to surrender all his clothing at night and stand naked in his cell for roll call. For several days in January 2011, he was forbidden to wear his eyeglasses and forced to strip down to his underwear during the day, the motion contends.

The Defense Department has said that Manning's treatment properly conformed to the "maximum custody" or "prevention of injury" classifications in which he was held in Quantico, Va., from July 29, 2010, to April 20, 2011, when he was moved to medium-security confinement at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Manning's lawyers claim there was no legal or medical justification for the harsh restrictions, and that his custody status contradicted the recommendations of multiple psychiatrists.

Manning's lawyers intend to have Manning testify about his Quantico experience during a hearing Oct. 1-5, according to the document.

Military prosecutors didn't immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on the motion posted by Manning's civilian attorney, David Coombs, on his website.

In an accompanying summary, Coombs wrote that he recently became aware of emails revealing that the brig officer who ordered the restrictions was acting on orders from an unidentified, three-star general.

Manning faces 22 charges for allegedly sending hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and war logs to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

U.S. Navy ship collides with oil tanker in Gulf

U.S. Navy ship collides with oil tanker in Gulf

MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) – One of the U.S. Navy's guided-missile destroyers suffered minor damage when it collided with an oil tanker early Sunday just outside the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

The collision left a gaping hole in the starboard side of USS Porter but no one was injured on either vessel, the U.S. Navy said in a statement. The collision with the Panamanian-flagged bulk oil tanker M/V Otowasan occurred at approximately 1 a.m. local time.

The cause of the incident is under investigation, the Navy said, adding that there were no reports of spills or leakages from either the USS Porter or the Otowasan.

The USS Porter is on a scheduled deployment to the U.S. 5th Fleet, which is based in Bahrain.

The Strait of Hormuz, located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is where one-fifth of the world's oil is routed. Tensions have risen there over Iran's threats to block tanker traffic in retaliation for tighter sanctions by the West.

Three years ago, The USS Hartford, a nuclear-powered submarine based in Groton, Conn., collided in the Strait with the USS New Orleans, a San Diego-based amphibious ship.

The New Orleans' fuel tank was ruptured and 15 sailors on the Hartford sustained minor injuries. The collision caused $2.3 million in damage to the New Orleans, and the cost so far of repairs to the Hartford is $102.6 million.

The commanding officer was relieved of his duties and the sub's chief of the boat, an adviser to the commanding officer, was reassigned. Several crew members were punished.

Spending billions to save 68 minutes murdering a bin Laden wannabe???

Key test set for sustained hypersonic flight

By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times

August 13, 2012, 3:43 a.m.

Since test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, engineers and scientists have dreamed of ever-faster aircraft. Now, they face one of their toughest challenges yet: sustaining hypersonic flight — going five times the speed of sound or more — for more than a few minutes.

In a nondescript hangar at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, a team of aerospace engineers has been putting the finishing touches on a lightning-quick experimental aircraft designed to fly above the Pacific Ocean at 3,600 mph. A passenger aircraft traveling at that speed could fly from Los Angeles to New York in 46 minutes.

On Tuesday a key test is set for the unmanned experimental aircraft X-51A WaveRider. It will take the aircraft — attached to a B-52 bomber's wing — from Edwards to about 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean near Point Mugu. From there, its high-speed journey at Mach 6 is expected to last only 300 seconds, but that's twice as long as it's ever gone at that speed.

Aerospace engineers say that harnessing technology capable of sustaining hypersonic speeds is crucial to the next generation of missiles, military aircraft, spacecraft — and even passenger planes.

"Attaining sustained hypersonic flight is like going from propeller-driven aircraft to jet aircraft," said Robert A. Mercier, deputy for technology in the high speed systems division at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio. "Since the Wright brothers, we have examined how to make aircraft better and faster. Hypersonic flight is one of those areas that is a potential frontier for aeronautics. I believe we're standing in the door waiting to go into that arena."

NASA and the Pentagon are financing three national centers across the country to study hypersonic flight. The Pentagon's research arm, known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, calls hypersonic flight "the new stealth" for its promise of evading and outrunning enemy fire. The effort to develop hypersonic engines is necessary because they can propel vehicles at a velocity that cannot be achieved from traditional turbine-powered jet engines.

The Pentagon believes that hypersonic missiles are the best way to hit a target in an hour or less. The only vehicle that the military currently has in its inventory with that kind of capability is the massive, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.

Other means of hitting a distant target, such as cruise missiles and long-range bomber planes, can take hours to reach their destination.

When pressed for an example of the need, military officials often point to a 1998 attack when the U.S. militarytried — and failed — to kill Osama bin Laden. Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea lobbed cruise missiles at training camps in Afghanistan, hitting their targets — 80 minutes later. By then, Bin Laden was gone.

But with a hypersonic missile, such as the technology being tested on the WaveRider, "the attack would have been cut to just over 12 minutes," Richard Hallion, a former Air Force senior advisor, said in an Air Force Assn. report about hypersonic technology.

The Pentagon itself is funding six major hypersonic technology programs. Over the last 10 years, the Pentagon said it spent as much as $2 billion on hypersonic technologies and supporting engineering.

The WaveRider program is estimated to cost $140 million, according to Globalsecurity.org, a website for military policy research.

Yet the funding has turned up few positive results.

One of the more recent attempts was in August 2011 when DARPA carried out a test flight of an arrowhead-shaped unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2. It's designed to travel at 20 times the speed of sound. The launch had received worldwide attention and much fanfare, but minutes into the flight, searing high speeds caused portions of the Falcon's skin to peel from the aerostructure and the flight ended prematurely.

Engineers at Boeing Co.'s research center in Huntington Beach and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park thought they were on the right track with the WaveRider program in May 2010 when the WaveRider made its first flight. In that flight, the WaveRider sped westward for about 143 seconds at 3,500 mph before plunging into the ocean as planned.

But in June 2011 in another WaveRider flight a lapse in airflow to the jet engine caused a premature shutdown.

After the flight, Charlie Brink, the Air Force Research Laboratory's program manager, said the WaveRider attempted to restart but was unsuccessful. "Obviously we're disappointed and expected better results," he said at the time. "But we are very pleased with the data collected on this flight."

Brink and his team try again on a test flight scheduled for Tuesday. The WaveRider will fall like a bomb for about four seconds over the Pacific before its booster rocket engine ignites and propels the nearly wingless aircraft for 30 seconds to about Mach 4.5, before being jettisoned.

Then the cruiser's scramjet engine, notable because it has virtually no moving parts, ignites. The ignition sequence begins burning ethylene, transitioning over about 10 seconds to JP-7 jet fuel — the same fuel once used by the famed Lockheed Corp.-made SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The WaveRider is expected to accelerate to about Mach 6 as it climbs to nearly 70,000 feet.

After 300 seconds of flight, the WaveRider is set to break up after splashing into the Pacific, as planned. There are no plans to recover the WaveRider.

The cruiser is designed to ride its own shock wave. That's how the X-51 earned the WaveRider nickname.

"The X-51 is a technology feeder to larger, more sustained flight times," said Darryl W. Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works, which built the cruiser. "The hope is to advance the state of the art."

Dora Musielak, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington whose research focuses on high-speed propulsion, said aircraft like the WaveRider are crucial to commercial planes one day flying nonstop at high speeds from one side of the earth to the other. Other than the turbojet-powered Concorde retired in 2003, commercial transportation has not advanced beyond the speed of sound.

"It is always a dream to see an airplane fly faster," Musielak said, noting that there's still an enormous amount of hypersonic development work ahead. "Once the military proves out the concept, hypersonic transport becomes a step closer to reality."

william.hennigan@latimes.com

Phoenix VA screws up 47 percent of all claims???

Source

Phoenix benefits mishap vexes veterans

Audit finds claims incorrectly processed in 3 disability areas, noted VA agency backlog

by Ken Alltucker - Aug. 12, 2012 09:08 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

The federal agency that handles veterans benefits in Phoenix bungled nearly half the temporary-disability, traumatic-brain-injury and herbicide-exposure claims that were examined during a recent audit.

The Veterans Benefits Administration office in Phoenix mishandled 47 percent of the claims in those three areas, according to a limited audit by the agency's inspector general issued last month.

The mishandled claims frustrate veterans who must wait an average of nearly one year before the Phoenix office decides whether they are eligible for compensation. The Phoenix office has a backlog of more than 22,700 claims, with an average wait of 360 days before the cases are decided.

Veterans organizations say the report illustrates the challenges that both returning soldiers and veterans face when attempting to secure a timely and accurate decision on benefits for disabilities.

"This is something we have been struggling with for a very long time," said Tom Tarantino, chief policy officer at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "The disability evaluation system was obsolete even before the Iraq and Afghanistan (wars)."

The inspector general audit represented just a fraction of the total cases handled by the Phoenix office, and it focused on disability areas that are more likely to have a higher error rate, according to the report.

Representatives of the local VA benefits office declined to be interviewed about the errors and case backlog.

But the Phoenix office provided another internal report that showed it accurately processed 88 percent of all claims, which is slightly above the national average.

"While the (inspector general) may have found a high error rate in the intentionally limited selection of claims they reviewed, the overall picture of claims processing at the Phoenix (office) is much more positive," the agency's Phoenix office said in a statement.

The highest error rate -- blamed on a computer glitch that has since been fixed -- came from the agency's handling of "100 percent" temporary-disability claims, with 87 percent of those cases incorrectly processed. The local office did not coordinate timely medical evaluations of those veterans.

The error rates were lower for the traumatic-brain-injury and herbicide-exposure claims, 30 percent and 20 percent respectively, and the Phoenix office has implemented training programs to address those claims. Those ranged from paperwork errors to improperly assigning symptoms to medical conditions. The errors resulted in veterans either collecting too much compensation or not enough, depending on the specifics of their case.

The audit also found trouble with the Phoenix office's management of its mushrooming workload.

For example, the benefits office still used handheld date stamps to process incoming mail even though the VA requires electronic stamps to prevent errors. The report found that the Phoenix staff did not correctly interpret internal rules that required the switch to electronic stamps for more accurate documentation.

The audit also found the Phoenix office did not properly evaluate mental-health claims for 10 of 17 Gulf War veterans.

"As a result, veterans may be unaware of their possible entitlement to treatment for mental disorders and may not get the care they need," the inspector general's report said.

The VA is grappling with a nationwide backlog of benefits cases as well as errors in processing cases. As of July 28, there were more than 906,000 pending benefits claims from veterans nationwide, with two-thirds of those cases taking more than 125 days to process.

About 76 percent of the Phoenix cases take longer than 125 days to resolve. Among 16 regional VA offices in the Western U.S. and in Manila, Philippines, only Oakland, Seattle and Los Angeles have a higher share of cases that took more than 125 days to process, the VA's records show.

Tarantino said that claims for traumatic brain injury, or TBI, can be especially problematic for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Such cases are often misdiagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

"People are working on TBI claims for two to three years," he said. "The problem is it is incredibly hard to diagnose."

Other experts say that if a veteran appeals a ruling, the wait can grow even longer.

Brett Buchanan, a VA-accredited claims agent with Belleville, Ill.-based consultant Allsup, said that one of the biggest challenges for veterans is ensuring they have appropriate medical documentation.

Veterans who are discharged from the military may see their disability worsen by the time they apply for benefits.

But those veterans may not get proper compensation if they lack documentation and medical evidence, Buchanan said.

That can mean a big difference in how much compensation a veteran can secure. A veteran who is rated at 10 percent disability would get $127 a month, but a veteran rated at 100 percent disability would be paid $2,769 per month, according to Buchanan.

"It comes down to an interpretation of the medical evidence," Buchanan said.

Reach the reporter at ken.alltucker@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8285.

War monger John McCain - Defense spending cuts threaten national security!!!!

Source

McCain: 'Fiscal cliff' threatens Arizona

by J. Craig Anderson - Aug. 14, 2012 06:44 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

The impact of automatic military-spending cuts set to take effect in 2013 would be devastating to national security and Arizona's defense industry, U.S. Sen. John McCain told a group of Boeing Co. employees Tuesday in Mesa.

McCain, R-Ariz., addressed about 150 employees at Boeing's Apache Helicopter and Military Support campus as part of a cross-country tour to raise awareness about the threat of automatic cuts that will occur starting Jan. 1 unless Congress passes a deficit-reduction bill.

Under the Budget Control Act, enacted in August 2011 as a condition of raising the federal debt ceiling, Congress must pass a bill this year that includes at least $1.2 trillion in federal budget cuts to avoid triggering a series of automatic cuts known as "sequestrations."

The threat of sequestrations across a broad range of federal programs such as defense spending, social-welfare programs and education often is referred to as the "fiscal cliff."

The cuts would total $1.2 trillion over a seven-year period starting in 2013, including $500 billion in defense-spending cuts.

McCain, citing statistics from a recent George Mason University report, said the impact of defense-spending sequestration on Arizona would include more than 35,000 layoffs and a $3 billion loss to Arizona's gross state product.

According to the Arizona Commerce Authority, defense contractors such as Boeing, General Dynamics C4 Systems, Raytheon Missile Systems and BAE Systems employ about 93,000 Arizonans and generate $7 billion to $9 billion in revenue within the state.

"I can't tell you that this facility will be immune," he told the Boeing employees. "We've got to fix it before it's too late."

McCain said he favors significant federal spending cuts but said sequestration would be too draconian and arbitrary. "You can't do it with a meat axe; you have to do it with a scalpel," he said.

McCain derided Congress and President Barack Obama for not trying harder to negotiate voluntary spending cuts to avoid sequestration. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been outspoken in his warnings about the ramifications if the cuts go into effect, and Congress is expected to tackle the issue in its post-election lame-duck session.

"We can undo it, but it's going to take people working together under the leadership of the president," McCain said. "He should be calling us together to work on a compromise."

Reach the reporter at craig.anderson@arizonarepublic.com.

Special ops group attacks Obama over bin Laden bragging, leaks

Special ops group attacks Obama over bin Laden bragging, leaks

By Mark Hosenball | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives is set to launch a media campaign, including TV ads, that scolds President Barack Obama for taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and argues that high-level leaks are endangering American lives.

Leaders of the group, the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, say it is nonpartisan and unconnected to any political party or presidential campaign. It is registered as a so-called social welfare group, which means its primary purpose is to further the common good and its political activities should be secondary.

In the past, military exploits have been turned against presidential candidates by outside groups, most famously the Swift Boat ads in 2004 that questioned Democratic nominee John Kerry's Vietnam War service.

The OPSEC group says it is not political and aims to save American lives. Its first public salvo is a 22-minute film that includes criticism of Obama and his administration. The film, to be released on Wednesday, was seen in advance by Reuters.

"Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not," Ben Smith, identified as a Navy SEAL, says in the film.

"As a citizen, it is my civic duty to tell the president to stop leaking information to the enemy," Smith continues. "It will get Americans killed."

An Obama campaign official said: "No one in this group is in a position to speak with any authority on these issues and on what impact these leaks might have, and it's clear they've resorted to making things up for purely political reasons."

Obama has highlighted his foreign policy record on the campaign trail, emphasizing how he presided over the killing of bin Laden, as well as how he ended the war in Iraq and set a timeline for winding down the war in Afghanistan.

However, Obama has come under sharp attack from Republican lawmakers who have accused his administration of being behind high-level leaks of classified information.

They have pointed to media reports about clandestine drone attacks, informants planted in al Qaeda affiliates and alleged cyber-warfare against Iran that Republicans say were calculated to promote Obama's image as a strong leader in an election year.

The White House has denied leaking classified information.

The president of Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, Scott Taylor, is a former Navy SEAL who in 2010 ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Virginia.

Calling itself "OPSEC" for short - which in spy jargon means "operational security" - the anti-leak group incorporated last June in Delaware, a state that has the most secretive corporate registration rules in the U.S.

It also set itself up as a nonprofit organization under section 501(c)4 of the U.S. Tax Code, allowing it to keep donors' identities secret. Spokesmen for the group declined to discuss its sources of financing.

Several group representatives say their main motivation for setting up OPSEC was dismay at recent detailed media leaks about sensitive operations.

In an interview, Taylor denied OPSEC had any political slant. He described the group as a "watchdog organization" but added that the current administration "has certainly leaked more than others."

OPSEC spokesmen said the group has about $1 million at its disposal and hopes to raise more after the release of its mini-documentary, entitled "Dishonorable Disclosures," which aims, in spy-movie style, to document a recent spate of leaks regarding sensitive intelligence and military operations.

Following the film's release, OPSEC's spokesmen said, the group expects to produce TV spots on the anti-leak theme that will air in a number of states, including Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada - key battleground states.

Fred Rustmann, a former undercover case officer for the CIA who is a spokesman for the group, insisted its focus on leaks was "not a partisan concern." But he said the current administration had been leaking secrets "to help this guy get re-elected, at the expense of peoples' lives.... We want to see that they don't do this again."

Chad Kolton, a former spokesman for the office of Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration who now represents OPSEC, also said the group's message and make-up are nonpolitical.

"You'll see throughout the film that concern about protecting the lives of intelligence and Special Forces officers takes precedence over partisanship," he said.

Responding to criticism about the president taking credit for the bin Laden raid, an Obama campaign official pointed to an interview with CNN last month in which Admiral Bill McRaven, commander of the raid, said: "At the end of the day, make no mistake about it, it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden for this operation, that made the hard decisions, that was instrumental in the planning process, because I pitched every plan to him."

"I think Admiral McRaven knows more about the President's role in the bin Laden operation than this group," the campaign official said.

Army general investigated over spending

Army general investigated over spending

Aug. 15, 2012 04:26 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- A four-star Army general who was the first head of the new U.S. Africa Command is under investigation and facing possible demotion for allegedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars improperly on lavish travel, hotels and other items, The Associated Press has learned.

Gen. William "Kip" Ward has been under investigation for about 17 months, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expected to make a final decision on the matter before the end of the month, according to several defense officials.

The defense officials said Ward is facing numerous allegations that he spent several hundred thousand dollars allowing unauthorized people, including family members, to fly on government planes, and spent excessive amounts of money on hotel rooms, transportation and other expenses when he traveled as head of Africa Command.

A four-star general is the highest rank in the Army.

While the exact amount of alleged misspending was not disclosed, the estimated total raises comparisons with the $823,000 allegedly spent by dozens of employees of the General Services Administration, who were accused of lavish spending during an October 2010 conference at a Las Vegas resort.

Officials described the investigation to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because it is a personnel matter and the report on the investigation has not been released publicly.

The Defense Department inspector general has completed its investigation into Ward's activities, and the issue is under legal review.

A request for comment from Ward was not immediately fulfilled Wednesday.

Panetta's options regarding Ward are limited by complex laws and military guidelines.

Panetta can demote Ward and force him to retire at a lower rank. Because Ward's alleged offenses occurred while he was a four-star general, he could be forced to retire as a three-star, which officials said could cost him as much as $1 million in retirement pay over time. It was not immediately clear whether Ward also could face criminal charges.

Ward stepped down early last year after serving as the first head of the Europe-based Africa Command, which was created in 2007, and he intended to retire. He did all the paperwork and attended a retirement ceremony in April 2011, but the Army halted his plans to leave because of the investigation.

Ever since then, he has been working in Northern Virginia, serving as a special assistant to the vice chief of the Army.

That Army office long has been used as a holding area for general officers of varying ranks. For some it's a way station where senior officers under investigation go to await their fate.

For others, it's a quick stop en route to a new high-level command or assignment; a place they can hang their hat for a few weeks, working on special projects until their new post becomes available.

According to Army spokesman George Wright, Ward currently is the only special assistant to the vice chief, but at other times there can be several assigned there as they move from one command to the next.

The Stuttgart, Germany-based Africa Command was created in order to place a stronger focus on the continent, including vast sections of the north and east where al-Qaida-linked militant groups train and wage attacks. No U.S. military forces are assigned to Africa Command, other than the roughly 2,000 troops in Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, based in Djibouti.

U.S. military activities in Africa long have been a sensitive subject among many nations that inhabit the sprawling continent and worry that the U.S. would try to establish bases or send forces there. Initial plans to set up a headquarters for Africa Command on the continent hit resistance and were shelved.

A key element of Ward's job was to dispel worries about the new command, meet with African leaders and work to expand and strengthen U.S. military ties so that the nations there are better able to provide for their own defense.

Gen. Carter Ham took over the command last year, gaining accolades as one of two key U.S. military leaders directing operations in the Libya conflict.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan can't grow a beard???

Source

Accused Ft. Hood shooter fears 'imminent' death, attorneys say

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

August 15, 2012, 7:11 p.m.

FT. HOOD, Texas — A military appeals court Wednesday stayed the trial of accused Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan after judges found that forcibly shaving Hasan, as a military judge had ordered, would violate his religious freedom.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, a panel of four civilian judges appointed by the president and based in Washington, issued the order at the same time Hasan was appearing in court at the sprawling Army base in central Texas. The appeals panel, the highest court in the military system, is the equivalent of a federal Circuit Court of Appeal.

Hasan, 41, a U.S. Muslim born to Palestinian parents, appeared in court Wednesday with a full salt-and-pepper beard, in uniform and a wheelchair. He is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the November 2009 attack on the Army base, which left him paralyzed. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Hasan’s defense team argues that forcibly shaving their client would violate his 1st Amendment right to freedom of religion, since Hasan “is a practicing Muslim and has recently had a premonition that his death is imminent. He does not wish to die without a beard as he believes not having a beard is a sin,” according to his petition to the appeals court.

The lawyers noted that Hasan had “discussed his premonition and reasons for growing his beard” with a member of his military defense team who is an imam and who vouched for the fact that Hasan’s refusal to shave is due to “a sincere, personal religious conviction.”

Hasan had previously requested a religious exemption to wear a beard, but his request was denied by superiors, who cited the need for “discipline, unit cohesion and morale.” His attorneys noted that he had always appeared in “proper uniform” and had been careful not to make any “outbursts or act in any way to disrupt the court” — a reference to a ruling in June by the military trial judge, Col. Gregory Gross, that Hasan’s beard was a “disruption” to pretrial hearings.

Gross found Hasan in contempt and fined him $1,000 for violating Army grooming rules before announcing the stay. Hasan had already been fined $4,000 for refusing to shave.

As at earlier hearings, Hasan on Wednesday was forced to watch the proceedings from a nearby trailer equipped with closed-circuit television — an arrangement his attorneys said in their petition prevented them from counseling him during the hearings.

The four appellate judges agreed with the defense team that forcibly shaving Hasan would infringe on his freedom of religion, especially since he “has not in any way grown a beard to be defiant or to disrupt the court proceedings.” They questioned the reasoning for denying Hasan’s request for a religious exemption, especially since he now lives at the Bell County Jail, where his beard is unlikely to affect morale on base.

“Because alternatives which are less restrictive exist in this case, the judge’s order cannot stand” to forcibly shave Hasan for trial, the judges wrote in granting the stay.

Base spokesmen said the trial, which had been scheduled to start Monday, was stayed until the issue of Hasan’s beard was resolved.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Gross also addressed a motion by Hasan's attorneys that indicated Hasan wished to plead guilty for religious reasons, “to take responsibility for his actions.” Gross said that, by law, he could not accept a guilty plea in the capital case, but that Hasan's lawyers could still enter it.

The stay was issued before the lawyers could enter a plea.

At the Su Barber shop on Fort Hood Street, a busy thoroughfare across from the base, Spc. Tony Romano, 22, of Columbus, Ohio, appeared in uniform while getting a haircut. Romano, back from serving in Afghanistan, wasn't stationed at Ft. Hood when the shooting occurred, but he has strong feelings about Hasan standing trial and facing the consequences of his purported actions — even if that means he has to be shaved against his will.

“If he's going to be in this uniform, he needs to look presentable,” Romano said as he paid $8 for his cut and left the shop.

Bloody day stirs fears about Iraq stability

Source

Bloody day stirs fears about Iraq stability

Car bombs caused many of deaths; toll for August approaches 200

by Adam Schreck - Aug. 17, 2012 11:28 PM

Associated Press

BAGHDAD - Iraqi officials said Friday that a blistering string of attacks across the country the previous day killed at least 93 people and wounded many more, as the extent of the violence grew clearer and mourners began to bury their dead.

It was Iraq's second-deadliest day since U.S. troops left in December, surpassed only by a coordinated wave of killings last month.

Thursday's attacks seemed meant to strike fear in Iraqis and undermine faith in the Shiite-led government's security measures, ahead of what was supposed to be a festive holiday weekend.

There was no claim of responsibility for Thursday's strikes. Coordinated bombings and related attacks are a favorite tactic of the al-Qaida offshoot known as the Islamic State of Iraq.

Since the beginning of August, more than 190 people have been killed in violence across Iraq, showing that insurgents led by al-Qaida's Iraqi franchise remain a lethal force eight months after the last U.S. troops left the country.

"Al-Qaida wants to send a clear message to the Iraqi people that the terrorists are still strong and able to harm them despite the huge amount of funds spent on the Iraqi security forces," said Shiite lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili, a member of the parliament's security and defense committee. "The terrorists want to tell the Iraqi people that the security forces are still incapable of protecting them."

Officials had feared an upsurge in violence coinciding with the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this weekend. Steps have been taken to ramp up security measures to protect the crowds who gather in public places such as mosques, parks and restaurants to celebrate.

Thursday's attacks began early in northern Iraq and ended with deadly bomb explosions near busy markets, restaurants and ice cream parlors before midnight.

Car bombs were to blame for many of the deaths, though attackers also deployed smaller explosives and shot some of the victims. A suicide bomber claimed seven lives when he blew himself up inside a tea shop in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of the capital.

"I am appalled at the wave of heinous attacks that shook the country throughout the day yesterday," the United Nations envoy to Iraq, Martin Kobler, said in a statement. "They violate the spirit of peace associated with this holiest of times in the Muslim year."

Among the higher casualty numbers disclosed Friday were 21 people killed when a car bomb detonated shortly before midnight near an ice cream shop in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite Zafaraniyah neighborhood, according to police and hospital officials.

Another bomb exploded near an ice cream parlor and fruit and vegetable stalls in the capital's Sadr City, another poor Shiite district. The black, mangled car sat in the middle of the street Friday. Broken plastic chairs and blood-stained fixtures littered the sidewalk.

That blast killed 14, authorities said.

Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the tolls to reporters.

Hassan Karim, 23, was in the Sadr City ice cream shop chatting with friends when the bomb went off.

"I saw a big flash, followed by thunderous noise. ... I opened my eyes to find myself in the hospital with my left hand bandaged," he said. "Before yesterday, we thought there were still safe places to sit and have a nice time with friends, but with this explosion we know there is no safe place in Iraq. All the best security measures could not stop terrorists from killing people."

Dozens of people carried the coffins of relatives through the streets of the neighborhood Friday. Some mourners wept, while others sought solace by chanting "God is great."

The attacks Thursday coincided with the release of a video purporting to show an al-Qaida raid on the western town of Haditha in March. The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks Islamist extremist messages, said the nearly 50-minute video was produced by the Islamic State of Iraq's media arm and posted on jihadi web forums Thursday.

Assailants in the Haditha raid killed 25 policemen, at one point raising the al-Qaida battle flag, before most managed to escape into the desert.

Al-Qaida's Iraq branch has said it aims to make a comeback in predominantly Sunni areas from which it was routed by the U.S. and its local allies after sectarian fighting peaked in 2007. It has for years had a hot-and-cold relationship with the global terror network's leadership.

Both shared the goal of targeting the U.S. military in Iraq and, to an extent, undermining the Shiite government that replaced Saddam Hussein's regime. But al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri distanced themselves from the Iraqi militants in 2007 for also killing Iraqi civilians instead of focusing on Western targets.

Generally, al-Qaida in Iraq does not launch attacks or otherwise operate beyond Iraq's borders. But in early 2012, al-Zawahri urged Iraqi insurgents to support the Sunni-based uprising in neighboring Syria against President Bashar Assad, an Alawite. The sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Thursday's attacks, which included several bombings in the ethnically mixed northern flashpoint of Kirkuk, were Iraq's deadliest in weeks.

On July 23, a string of coordinated blasts and shootings left 115 people dead.

Al-Qaida later claimed responsibility for those attacks, which it said marked the start of a campaign called "Breaking the Walls" that was announced by the local insurgency's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Contract for radar system to detect ultralight drug smugglers???

I wouldn't doubt it. The insane "war on drugs" and "war on terror" keeps getting insaner ever day.

And of course both the "war on drugs" and "war on terror" are really wars on the American people along with being a war on the Bill of Rights.

And of course the "war on drugs" and "war on terror" are also jobs programs for federal, state and local cops.

Source

Border drug enforcers award ultralight-detection-system contract

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times

August 18, 2012

U.S. border authorities have awarded a $99.9-million contract to a New York-based company to develop a radar system to detect low-flying ultralight aircraft used to smuggle drugs from Mexico.

The solo-piloted aircraft that resemble motorized hang gliders are difficult to detect with conventional radar technology and can carry payloads up to 250 pounds.

The planes fly slowly above areas from San Diego to Arizona, dropping their loads of marijuana before escaping to Mexico. More than 700 incursions, at least two of which occurred over San Diego's Interstate 8, have been reported since the trend began in 2008.

The Department of Homeland Security awarded the contract last week to SRCTec, a defense contractor that specializes in advanced radar systems. It will build nine ultralight aircraft detection systems for about $7 million in the first phase of a deal that includes options to extend for 10 years, said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) in an interview with the Syracuse Post-Standard. The systems are to be delivered in February, Schumer said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection monitors the nation's air traffic from the Air and Marine Operations Center at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County. Although largely successful against general aviation smuggling, radar operators have difficulty detecting ultralights. The aircraft fly as low as 500 feet, and their small frames are hard to distinguish from trucks. Many appear, then disappear from radar screens.

Authorities have had some success. The pilots usually fly at night and no longer land on U.S. soil after authorities began responding quickly to off-loading sites. In Arizona, where the vast majority of the flights occur, authorities have arrested at least 36 people in connection with ultralight smuggling, most of them ground crew members who load the dropped marijuana into cars.

richard.marosi@latimes.com

US turning Afghanistan into a police state???

U.S. plans to beef up rural police forces in Afghanistan

By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times

August 17, 2012, 7:27 p.m.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to double the size of a rural police force in Afghanistan and arm it with heavier weapons to fight insurgents as U.S. troops withdraw, despite Pentagon and Afghan government concern about the village self-defense units becoming predatory criminal gangs or defecting to the Taliban.

The danger was highlighted Friday when a new member of the Afghan Local Police shot and killed two U.S. special operations troops and wounded a third moments after they gave him his service weapon during a ceremony for new recruits in the western province of Farah.

The attacker, who had joined the force just five days earlier, was about to take part in his first weapons-training session on a firing range. Instead, he opened fire on the American troops and fellow police. He was killed by return fire.

It was the latest in an intensifying spate of lethal "insider" attacks on NATO troops by Afghan soldiers, police and other government forces, causing growing alarm at the Pentagon. Afghan security forces have killed 24 Americans and 15 other Western soldiers so far this year. Nine have died in the last 11 days.

A 122-page report by the Defense Department's inspector general reveals glaring problems within the rural police system, which was set up with U.S. backing two years ago and has become a pivotal part of the American strategy to safeguard territorial gains and maintain political stability as Western nations withdraw most combat forces by the end of 2014.

U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of the NATO military force in Afghanistan, has ordered the 16,000-strong rural police force to be increased to 30,000 officers over the next two years, and then possibly expanded further.

In addition to equipping the police officers with AK-47 assault rifles, the Pentagon this year began supplying them with Russian heavy machine guns after local commanders complained that they were outgunned by Taliban insurgents.

The report, issued last month, credits the police with "significant and unexpected success" in expelling insurgent fighters from some remote villages and districts.

But many Afghan officials worry that the widely dispersed units will evolve into marauding criminal gangs or free-wheeling militias loyal to local warlords after departing U.S. forces stop paying their salaries, according to the inspector general's report.

"Why would I arm the villagers when they may use those weapons against the [government] in the future?" provincial governors and district chiefs in eastern Afghanistan asked U.S. special forces officers, according to the report.

For that reason, officials at the Afghan Ministry of Defense are opposing U.S. plans to double the size of the village guard force and increase its firepower, the report notes.

Local elders are supposed to guarantee the loyalty of police in the villages where they are recruited. But adding thousands more recruits over the next two years increases the risk that insurgents will infiltrate the force and that village units could become private armies for local leaders, the report warns.

Regular Afghan police in each province are supposed to oversee the local units. But there is "very little trust" between the two forces because provincial police are afraid that the village guards "would use their weapons against them," a senior U.S. logistics officer told investigators.

The Afghan Ministry of Interior is supposed to supply and pay the village police officers. But the system is weak, the report says, in part because the units are scattered in remote areas and because of concern about "arming future hostile ethnic militias."

Many of the village police officers are from predominantly Pashtun areas. The Taliban is heavily Pashtun.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now heads the CIA, proposed creating the Afghan Local Police in 2010 when he commanded the war in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai initially resisted, concerned that some Afghan officials would try to use the units as private militias.

Petraeus eventually won Karzai's support by promising that the Ministry of Interior, which the central government controls, would oversee and pay the force. He also said the program would be temporary, with the village units incorporated into the regular police or disbanded.

With the insurgency still raging, his successor, Gen. Allen, has abandoned those plans.

Allen plans to keep the local police force intact after 2014 and use it as a "strategic hold force" to help keep insurgents from returning to areas in the east and south that U.S. troops have managed to clear, the report says.

Allen has ordered the U.S. special operations command to look at expanding the local police to more than the current authorized level of 30,000, though the final size hasn't been decided.

"The long-term plan is to keep them around," said Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for Allen. "All these things come down to funding, however."

It is cheaper and quicker to train and equip local defense units than regular army and police.

With international funding drying up, Afghan security forces are expected to shrink in size in coming years from 352,000 to 280,000 or less, creating more need for local police, U.S. officers said.

The latest "insider" attacks haven't bolstered confidence in the police, however. In addition to Friday's attack, local police have taken part in at least three recent fatal shootings.

Last week, an Afghan officer helping train local police gunned down three special operations Marines in Helmand province. In another incident, a member of a local police unit gunned down a U.S. Armysergeant at a checkpoint in Paktika province, near the Pakistan border.

In late March, a policeman in Paktika province killed nine fellow officers. He first slipped drugs into their tea, then slaughtered them after they passed out.

U.S. officials say the attackers have various motivations. Some have personal grievances, others undergo "self-radicalization" after seeing anti-Western propaganda describing Americans and allies as infidels. Still others are Taliban sympathizers who infiltrate the Afghan security forces.

Allen said this year that more than half of the attacks involved Taliban supporters.

In a statement this week, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive Taliban leader believed to be living in Pakistan, praised insurgents for secretly joining the Afghan army and police to "easily carry out decisive and coordinated attacks, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy both in life and equipment." Other insurgents desert to the Taliban, he said, "carrying their heavy and light weapons and ammunition, after leaving the ranks of the enemy."

david.cloud@latimes.com

Times staff writer Laura King in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.

WikiLeaks and Free Speech

WikiLeaks and Free Speech

By MICHAEL MOORE and OLIVER STONE

Published: August 20, 2012

WE have spent our careers as filmmakers making the case that the news media in the United States often fail to inform Americans about the uglier actions of our own government. We therefore have been deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

Ecuador has acted in accordance with important principles of international human rights. Indeed, nothing could demonstrate the appropriateness of Ecuador’s action more than the British government’s threat to violate a sacrosanct principle of diplomatic relations and invade the embassy to arrest Mr. Assange.

Since WikiLeaks’ founding, it has revealed the “Collateral Murder” footage that shows the seemingly indiscriminate killing of Baghdad civilians by a United States Apache attack helicopter; further fine-grained detail about the true face of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; United States collusion with Yemen’s dictatorship to conceal our responsibility for bombing strikes there; the Obama administration’s pressure on other nations not to prosecute Bush-era officials for torture; and much more.

Predictably, the response from those who would prefer that Americans remain in the dark has been ferocious. Top elected leaders from both parties have called Mr. Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” And Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has demanded that he be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Most Americans, Britons and Swedes are unaware that Sweden has not formally charged Mr. Assange with any crime. Rather, it has issued a warrant for his arrest to question him about allegations of sexual assault in 2010.

All such allegations must be thoroughly investigated before Mr. Assange moves to a country that might put him beyond the reach of the Swedish justice system. But it is the British and Swedish governments that stand in the way of an investigation, not Mr. Assange.

Swedish authorities have traveled to other countries to conduct interrogations when needed, and the WikiLeaks founder has made clear his willingness to be questioned in London. Moreover, the Ecuadorean government made a direct offer to Sweden to allow Mr. Assange to be interviewed within Ecuador’s embassy. In both instances, Sweden refused.

Mr. Assange has also committed to traveling to Sweden immediately if the Swedish government pledges that it will not extradite him to the United States. Swedish officials have shown no interest in exploring this proposal, and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt recently told a legal adviser to Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks unequivocally that Sweden would not make such a pledge. The British government would also have the right under the relevant treaty to prevent Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States from Sweden, and has also refused to pledge that it would use this power. Ecuador’s attempts to facilitate that arrangement with both governments were rejected.

Taken together, the British and Swedish governments’ actions suggest to us that their real agenda is to get Mr. Assange to Sweden. Because of treaty and other considerations, he probably could be more easily extradited from there to the United States to face charges. Mr. Assange has every reason to fear such an outcome.The Justice Department recently confirmed that it was continuing to investigate WikiLeaks, and just-disclosed Australian government documents from this past February state that “the U.S. investigation into possible criminal conduct by Mr. Assange has been ongoing for more than a year.” WikiLeaks itself has published e-mails from Stratfor, a private intelligence corporation, which state that a grand jury has already returned a sealed indictment of Mr. Assange. And history indicates Sweden would buckle to any pressure from the United States to hand over Mr. Assange. In 2001 the Swedish government delivered two Egyptians seeking asylum to the C.I.A., which rendered them to the Mubarak regime, which tortured them.

If Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, the consequences will reverberate for years around the world. Mr. Assange is not an American citizen, and none of his actions have taken place on American soil. If the United States can prosecute a journalist in these circumstances, the governments of Russia or China could, by the same logic, demand that foreign reporters anywhere on earth be extradited for violating their laws. The setting of such a precedent should deeply concern everyone, admirers of WikiLeaks or not.

We urge the people of Britain and Sweden to demand that their governments answer some basic questions: Why do the Swedish authorities refuse to question Mr. Assange in London? And why can neither government promise that Mr. Assange will not be extradited to the United States? The citizens of Britain and Sweden have a rare opportunity to make a stand for free speech on behalf of the entire globe.

Michael Moore and Oliver Stone are Academy Award-winning filmmakers.

Afghan rocket strike hits top U.S. general's plane

Afghan rocket strike hits top U.S. general's plane

Aug. 21, 2012 09:43 AM

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Insurgents fired rockets into an American base in Afghanistan early Tuesday, damaging the parked plane of the visiting chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, the U.S. military said. The general was safe in his quarters at the time and later left the country aboard another aircraft.

The Taliban were quick to claim the rocket strike that hit the C-17 military transport plane of U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey as another propaganda coup. The militants also have said their fighters shot down a U.S. helicopter that crashed last week, killing seven Americans, though U.S. officials cast doubt on both insurgent claims.

Dempsey was in Afghanistan to discuss the state of the 10-year-old war as well as a string of disturbing killings of U.S. military trainers by their Afghan partners or militants dressed in Afghan uniform. Such attacks -- which the Taliban also claim to be behind -- killed 10 Americans in the last two weeks alone, threatening morale and raising questions about the international coalition's strategy to train Afghan security forces so they can fight the insurgency after foreign troops end their combat role in 2014.

Dempsey "was nowhere near" the plane when the two rockets landed near the parked aircraft at around 1 a.m. Tuesday at Bagram Air Field outside Kabul, said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S. military and the international coalition. Shrapnel from the rockets damaged the plane and also a nearby helicopter, a coalition statement said.

Two aircraft maintenance workers were lightly wounded by shrapnel, Graybeal said.

The general wrapped up his talks in Afghanistan and departed Tuesday morning on a different plane, the military said.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack, saying Dempsey's aircraft was targeted by insurgents "using exact information" about where it would be.

Graybeal disputed any claim of a precision attack. He said that insurgent rocket and mortar attacks are "not infrequent" at Bagram and that such fire most often comes from so far away that it's virtually impossible to hit specific targets.

Wilkinson also said it was unlikely the attack was aimed specifically at Dempsey's plane. "Indirect fire at Bagram is not unusual, so we don't believe his aircraft was targeted."

Bagram is a sprawling complex about an hour's drive north of Kabul that usually serves as the first point of entrance for U.S. officials visiting the country. It is the hub for military operations in the east of the country and the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.

Dempsey was in Afghanistan to discuss the state of the war after a particularly deadly few weeks for Americans in the more than 10-year-old war as international forces begin drawing down.

He and the chief of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. James R. Mattis, met with NATO and U.S. Afghan commander Gen. John Allen in Kabul and also with a number of senior Afghan and coalition leaders.

Among the topics was the escalating number of "insider attacks" in which Afghan security forces or militants dressed in Afghan uniform turn their guns on coalition military trainers. Once an anomaly, such attacks have been climbing in recent months. There have been 32 of them so far this year, up from 21 for all of 2011, according to NATO.

Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar last week said the killings were the result of an insurgent campaign of infiltration, though NATO has said it's too early to tell if the attacks were related to the insurgency or caused by personal disputes turned deadly.

The Taliban also claimed to have shot down a U.S. military helicopter that crashed during a firefight with insurgents in a remote area of southern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing seven Americans and four Afghans on board.

U.S. officials, however, said initial reports were that enemy fire was not involved in the crash.

Tuesday's insurgent attack was the second this year to come uncomfortably close to a high-level U.S. official visiting Afghanistan.

In March, an attacker tried to ram a car into a delegation waiting to greet U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at Bastion Air Field in southern Afghanistan as his C-17 taxied toward the landing ramp. U.S. defense officials said Panetta was never in any danger, but if the attacker had waited just a few more minutes, Panetta's plane would have been at the ramp.

Giving In to the Surveillance State

Op-Ed Contributor

Giving In to the Surveillance State

By SHANE HARRIS

Published: August 22, 2012

IN March 2002, John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, sat down with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency. Mr. Poindexter sketched out a new Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness, that proposed to scan the world’s electronic information — including phone calls, e-mails and financial and travel records — looking for transactions associated with terrorist plots. The N.S.A., the government’s chief eavesdropper, routinely collected and analyzed such signals, so Mr. Poindexter thought the agency was an obvious place to test his ideas.

He never had much of a chance. When T.I.A.’s existence became public, it was denounced as the height of post-9/11 excess and ridiculed for its creepy name. Mr. Poindexter’s notorious role in the Iran-contra affair became a central focus of the debate. He resigned from government, and T.I.A. was dismantled in 2003.

But what Mr. Poindexter didn’t know was that the N.S.A. was already pursuing its own version of the program, and on a scale that he had only imagined. A decade later, the legacy of T.I.A. is quietly thriving at the N.S.A. It is more pervasive than most people think, and it operates with little accountability or restraint.

The foundations of this surveillance apparatus were laid soon after 9/11, when President George W. Bush authorized the N.S.A. to monitor the communications records of Americans who analysts suspected had a “nexus to terrorism.” Acting on dubious legal authority, and without warrants, the N.S.A. began intercepting huge amounts of information.

But the N.S.A. came up with more dead ends than viable leads and put a premium on collecting information rather than making sense of it. The N.S.A. created what one senior Bush administration official later described as a “mirror” of AT&T’s databases, which allowed ready access to the personal communications moving over much of the country’s telecom infrastructure. The N.S.A. fed its bounty into software that created a dizzying social-network diagram of interconnected points and lines. The agency’s software geeks called it “the BAG,” which stood for “big ass graph.”

Today, this global surveillance system continues to grow. It now collects so much digital detritus — e-mails, calls, text messages, cellphone location data and a catalog of computer viruses — that the N.S.A. is building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and process it.

What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom. After T.I.A. was officially shut down in 2003, the N.S.A. adopted many of Mr. Poindexter’s ideas except for two: an application that would “anonymize” data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether innocent Americans’ communications were getting caught in a digital net.

The N.S.A. sorely needs such restrictions now. Under current law, it isn’t allowed to monitor the communications of an American citizen or permanent resident without a court order. But it can collect data if one party to a communication is believed to be outside the United States. Recently, the office of the director of national intelligence admitted that on at least one occasion, the procedures that shield citizens’ and legal residents’ private information from spying eyes had been deemed “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees such monitoring.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has questioned whether “backdoor” monitoring of citizens’ communications is occurring. Intelligence officials told Mr. Wyden that they couldn’t determine how many people inside the United States had their communications collected because checking the N.S.A.’s databases to find out would itself violate the privacy of those people. In other words, the protection of privacy rights is being invoked to cover up possible continuing violations of those same rights.

Why have we not seen the same level of public outrage as in 2003? Many Americans seem willing to give up their digital privacy if it means the government has a better chance of catching terrorists. Consider the revealing intelligence that millions of us give to Facebook — willingly. These days, we are more likely to be outraged by airport screening, and its public inconvenience and indignity, than by unseen monitoring.

Members of Congress rarely object because they don’t want to be seen as obstructing legal surveillance. But whether this surveillance is legal, and verifiably so, is an open question, and depends upon a complex law that even most lawmakers don’t understand. One can’t easily mount an opposition to a confusing statute that governs a secretive process.

The law governing the N.S.A. can accommodate greater oversight, and if the agency thinks otherwise, it should be open to amending the law. Had the agency’s leaders actually listened to everything Mr. Poindexter had to say, they might not find themselves telling the American people: “We’re not spying on you. Trust us.”

Shane Harris, a senior writer at Washingtonian, is the author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.”

Lancaster to launch aerial radar surveillance over neighborhoods

Lancaster to launch aerial radar surveillance over neighborhoods

August 24, 2012 | 8:59 am

The city of Lancaster plans to launch a new aerial surveillance system to monitor neighborhoods for crime.

The technology, called the Law Enforcement Aerial Platform System, will be attached to a piloted single-engine Cessna.

It's basically a radar system that will give deputies a bird's-eye view of what's happening on the ground.

The tool is similar to drones that are used by the military to survey war zones, with the difference that those are remote-controlled rather than attached to a plane.

Authorities say the technology will prove invaluable for the city because it's so large and spread out, and deputies can't be everywhere at once.

It could also help during natural disasters like fires or earthquakes by providing an aerial view of the situation.

Opponents have expressed concerns about government snooping, but city leaders insist that the surveillance will only be used to fight crime.

The Sheriff's Department plans to deploy LEAPS for 10 hours a day, at a coast of about $300 an hour. That adds up to about $90,000 per month and more than $1 million per year -- a hefty price tag in the cash-strapped city.

But city officials say that it's worth the investment to combat a recent spike in crime.

Armored American vehicle attacked in Mexico

Source

2 U.S. government employees reportedly shot in Mexico

Aug. 24, 2012 10:44 AM

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY -- Two U.S. government employees were shot and wounded in an attack on their vehicle south of Mexico City on Friday, a law enforcement official said.

The two were riding in an armored U.S. Embassy vehicle when they came under fire on a highway leading to the city of Cuernavaca.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said both were hospitalized, one with a wound to the leg and the other hit in the stomach and hand.

The official said the wounded were not agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency or FBI. [Why are DEA and FBI agents in Mexico???? Duh! Because they are helping Felipe Calderon with his "drug war", which we started]

The U.S. Embassy had no immediate comment.

A Mexican army official said the sport utility vehicle with diplomatic plates was found after a report about a shootout on the highway. The army official was not authorized to be quoted by name. He said a Mexican navy captain was also in the vehicle, but was not injured.

The Toyota SUV was riddled with bullets, most concentrated around the passenger-side window, indicating possible involvement by experienced gunmen. [I guess our American government masters don't pay much attention to the advice they give us which is to buy American!]

Attacks on diplomatic personnel are extremely rare in Mexico.

In 2011, one U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed and one wounded in a drug gang shooting in northern Mexico.

All 9 Empire State shooting victims hit by police

All 9 Empire State shooting victims hit by police

by Tom Hays - Aug. 25, 2012 09:43 AM

Associated Press

NEW YORK -- New York authorities confirm that all nine bystanders caught in the crossfire of a shooting outside the city's iconic Empire State Building were wounded by two police officers who had never fired their weapons on duty.

Officer Craig Matthews fired seven times and Officer Robert Sinishtaj fired nine times at Jeffrey Johnson on a busy Friday morning after Johnson shot a former co-worker to death and then pointed his pistol at them.

Police had said nine bystanders likely were wounded by stray or ricocheting police bullets, and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly confirmed that Saturday.

He says that based on ballistic tests and other evidence, "it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police."

Get your 4th Amendment rights back!!!!

Don't like the TSA thugs feeling you up at the airport???

For a measly $50 to $122.25 fee you can get your 4th Amendment rights back and avoid being felt up by TSA thugs every time you fly.

Of course to get your Fourth Amendment rights back you have to flush your 5th Amendment rights down the toilet and go thru an extensive background check, including an interview.

Please don't think of this as flushing the Constitution down the toilet. It's really a jobs program for overpaid and under worked cops.

Source

TSA opens fast lane through airport security

Prescreening to let some breeze through security

by Emily Gersema - Aug. 24, 2012 11:14 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

The Transportation Security Administration has launched a program at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport that could allow thousands of frequent fliers to accelerate their trip through security.

The Pre-Check program, which begins Tuesday, will give approved "trusted travelers" access to an expedited line at the airport's Terminal 4, which serves US Airways passengers. These travelers can skip some of the usual tasks that slow screenings -- removing shoes, belts and jackets, and separating laptops and plastic bags filled with lip balm and liquids.

And although the TSA will begin the program at only one Sky Harbor checkpoint, officials hope to expand to checkpoints serving other airlines, possibly affecting hundreds of thousands of travelers.

Travel-advocacy groups have pushed for expedited security programs for years. And Sky Harbor will become the 23rd airport in the nation to implement Pre-Check.

However, some fliers question the fairness of such programs: Participants must first qualify as frequent fliers, and they have to pay a fee and undergo background checks.

Some critics have said the government is treating the average traveler as a "second-class citizen" because Pre-Check is available only to frequent fliers.

But TSA officials say it's not about saving travelers' time, it's about using their resources more effectively.

How it works

As Rochelle and Willard Mears, of Sun City West, waited to board a US Airways flight last week, they said they would like to avoid much of the aggravation associated with flying.

Willard Mears has had double knee replacements, so a trip through security can be tedious. "I go through the whole pat down," he said.

To qualify for Pre-Check, the Mears, like other travelers, would have to take several steps.

Either they must accrue enough miles on US Airways to earn frequent-flier membership, or they must obtain special federal background clearance through one of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's three trusted traveler programs: Global Entry, NEXUS and SENTRI.

The programs charge fees -- from $50 to around $122 -- and applicants must pass an extensive background check, including an interview.

Once they've signed up, the frequent fliers' plane tickets will feature a special bar code that allows them to go through the expedited screening lane at their airlines' security checkpoints at participating airports.

Pre-Check participants also can bring their children 12 and younger through the faster screening lane. U.S. military members who carry a Common Access Card -- including those with the reserves and the National Guard -- also are cleared for Pre-Check.

TSA has no estimates on Pre-Check's reduced wait times. However, customs' studies show its trusted-traveler programs have reduced wait times for participants by an average of seven to 20 minutes.

TSA can remove Pre-Check status at any time, and the agency conducts recurrent background checks. If the government labels a passenger a terrorist, the TSA will add that person's name to the "no fly" list, and TSA will deny boarding to the person and he or she could face federal prosecution. If a passenger misbehaves or harasses agents, TSA also can add the person to a watch list, which requires more thorough security screening. Program expansion

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said the agency is working to broaden the Pre-Check program to other airlines and airports.

So far, the agency has focused on airlines with frequent-flier programs because "we just have more information about those people. And the more information we have, the more confident we are that they don't pose a threat," Melendez said.

TSA so far has access to frequent fliers' information from five airlines: Alaska, American, Delta, United and US Airways. The agency reviews travelers' information and, if they pass the agency's background check, sends them an invitation to "opt in" to Pre-Check. Airlines have had to share passenger information with the federal government since 9/11.

In the case of Sky Harbor, the agency started with Terminal 4, Checkpoint A, which is the main gateway to US Airways flights. Generally, airlines rent a series of gates and a single checkpoint leads to those gates.

Last year, more than 40 million people flew in and out of Sky Harbor, and an estimated 8 million -- 20 percent -- were on US Airways flights, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

There is not a timeline yet for the program's full expansion at Sky Harbor. But the program has expanded quickly. The TSA started testing it at Boston Logan International Airport last year. Since then, an estimated 2 million travelers have obtained Pre-Check clearance. Security backlash

For years, the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Travel Association urged the federal government to launch trusted-traveler programs after surveys showed people took trains and buses or drove long distances instead of flying -- just to avoid the hassle of TSA security checks.

Although the industry group applauded Pre-Check's expansion this year, the group's president and CEO, Roger Dow, said the federal government risks further deterring travelers from flying if it doesn't find a way to make its trusted-traveler programs accessible to more people.

"We must ensure Pre-Check is not just an enhancement to elite frequent-flier programs, focus on expanding enrollment in the program to average American travelers and allow greater cross-enrollment for Pre-Check passengers," Dow said in a statement earlier this year.

Melendez said TSA about a year ago decided to expand Pre-Check because it frees agents to focus on more thorough screenings of passengers whom it knows little about or whom it regards as potential security threats, such as those on its extensive Terror Watch List, a large list the agency thoroughly screens before allowing to board.

"This is about becoming more effective with our resources," Melendez said. "If we know more about certain passengers, we don't have to spend as much time on screening them, so we can focus more on passengers we don't know as much about."

The agency has faced criticism over concerns about privacy rights. The consumer protection group Electronic Privacy Information Center has argued, unsuccessfully, that the federal government should limit which government agencies and workers can access trusted-travelers' information, including fingerprints and Social Security numbers.

But for some, applying for federal clearance might be worth the hassle.

During his layover in Phoenix this week, Todd Hughes of Mechanicsville, Md., said he thought the program could be especially useful for parents with young children. When his wife flew with their young daughter, he remembered she would have to carry the child, plus baby gear, a stroller and her own carry-on items, through security.

"Anything that would reduce some of those steps would help," Hughes said.

TSA's Pre-Check program

The expedited-screening program is open to passengers who clear a federal background check and are frequent fliers with five airlines: Alaska, American, Delta, United and US Airways.

The program also is open to passengers who participate in these U.S. Customs and Border Protection trusted-traveler programs: Global Entry, NEXUS and SENTRI.

Global Entry is for all international and domestic travel; NEXUS is for U.S. and Canadian travelers who frequently go through ports on the U.S.-Canadian border; SENTRI is for U.S. citizens and Mexican nationals who frequently pass through ports on the U.S.-Mexico border. (Customs is working on merging the three into a single program.)

All three programs require an application fee. SENTRI costs $122.25. NEXUS is $50 to apply. Global Entry is $100.

Source: http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm.

Arizona National Guard General fired!!!!

Source

State Air National Guard leader dismissed

by Dennis Wagner - Aug. 24, 2012 11:20 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

The commander of Arizona's Air National Guard has been fired in the wake of an investigation by the Air Force Inspector General that was prompted by subordinate officers whom he had fired for alleged misconduct.

Brig. Gen. Michael Colangelo, who also served as assistant adjutant general, was terminated from his state position Aug. 14 and given a 31-day notice that his military services are no longer needed, said Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar, the Arizona National Guard commander. While the investigation was prompted by the officers' complaints, Salazar said he fired Colangelo because of "a breakdown in trust, not the investigative findings."

Colangelo, a Guard member for half of his 34-year military career, declined comment. But state records regarding his termination include an e-mail exchange between Colangelo and Salazar, the Guard's top commanders. The exchange came while Colangelo was attempting to enlist help in preserving his job from Gov. Jan Brewer, who oversees the Arizona National Guard.

Brewer declined comment.

Salazar confirmed Friday that Colangelo was the subject of an investigation prompted by complaints of retaliation from former Air Guard commanders who had been fired.

After the Inspector General ruled that Colangelo had abused his authority, Salazar issued a written reprimand in July, and also a memorandum warning that Colangelo would be dismissed if charges against him were not overturned.

Colangelo, who contested the Inspector General findings, wrote a rebuttal letter challenging Salazar's disciplinary action. The Inspector General report is not likely to be released publicly for several months.

In an Aug. 10 e-mail to Salazar, Colangelo expressed a sense of betrayal: "Sir. Your deceit and very obvious dishonorable intentions toward me are leaving me no choice but to seek relief outside of the immediate chain of command." Colangelo complained that the reprimand and warning memo were "irrational and unfounded," and that Salazar knew the Inspector General findings were false.

Salazar responded within hours, telling Colangelo: "Your email below is beyond inappropriate; it is false and blatantly disrespectful ... Effective immediately I am suspending you from both of your positions in AZNG with an eye toward removal.

"I am saddened that this action has become necessary, particularly when considering your many years of service ... But your actions leave me no choice. I have lost confidence in your judgment."

The Arizona National Guard is a state agency that reports to the governor under the Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, based at the Papago military installation in Phoenix. It comprises about 5,500 personnel -- including 1,400 full-time soldiers and airmen -- who may be called to federal service under the Department of Defense. Besides serving in combat theaters, National Guard soldiers and airmen take part in border security, counter-narcotics operations, disaster response and other domestic operations.

The guard is divided into Air and Army branches under the leadership of Salazar, known as the adjutant general.

"It's about the relationship," Salazar said of the dismissal. "My action against him was just because I wanted to go in a different direction. He was not terminated for the I.G. complaints."

The National Guard did not immediately provide documentation sought under Arizona's public-records law, and Salazar declined comment on specifics of the Inspector General's findings. But he confirmed the probe was sought by Air Guard officers who had been fired by Colangelo, with Salazar's approval, for alleged misconduct within the past couple of years.

Those dismissed were: Brig. Gen. Gregory Stroud and Col. Randall Straka, both with the 162nd Fighter Wing; and Col. Gregg Davies and Lt. Col. Thomas "Buzz" Rempfer, both with the 214th Reconnaissance Group.

None of the former Air Guard officers could be reached for comment, and details of their dismissals were not available.

In a letter to Brewer, Colangelo's wife, Robin, said her husband was "relieved from his job for making the tough right choices" that included termination of subordinates for unethical behavior. Robin Colangelo's letter includes allegations challenging the integrity of Salazar and other officers. She implored Brewer to investigate.

Another letter to the governor came from Ulay Littleton, of Tucson, a brigadier general who retired in 2010 after 37 years with the Air National Guard. Littleton wrote that he was still a commander when the Air Guard scandal first erupted, and he knows the Inspector General report to be a "hatchet job."

"Additionally, I believe MG (Maj. Gen.) Salazar is using the report as a means to get rid of Gen. Colangelo since he views Gen. Colangelo as a threat to his continuing as the Arizona Adjutant General," Littleton concluded.

In an interview, Littleton described Colangelo as "one of the finest officers I've ever worked for," and said his termination is "a gross injustice."

As assistant adjutant general and Air Guard commander, Colangelo was in charge of the 162nd Fighter Wing at Tucson International Airport, which conducts international pilot training; the 161st Air Refueling Wing at Sky Harbor International Airport, which conducts KC-135 aerial refueling missions; the 107th Air Control Squadron at Luke Air Force Base, which trains weapons directors; and the 214th Reconnaissance Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where MQ-1 Predator drones are based.

Colangelo had previously commanded the state's Joint Counter Narco-Terrorism Task Force, which provides intelligence assistance to law enforcement, and helped establish the Predator program that operates unmanned surveillance aircraft.

Lancaster's surveillance flights raise privacy fears

Lancaster's daily aerial surveillance flights raise privacy fears

August 25, 2012 | 9:02 am

Lancaster this week embarked on what experts say is a first-of-its-kind aerial surveillance over the city, using a small Cessna plane.

The plane, equipped with sophisticated video equipment, is set fly a loop above the city for up to 10 hours a day, beaming a live video feed of what's going on below to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department dispatch center.

The camera will inevitably pick up scenes of mundane day-to-day life. Officials said they planned to use the video only to track reports of crimes in progress, traffic collisions and other emergency situations.

About a few hours into its maiden flight Friday, the plane's video feed captured its first incident: a motorcycle rider who had crashed at 20th Street East and Avenue K. Using the video, deputies in the dispatch center were able to help paramedics assess the situation before they got to the scene. Later, the department got word that a group fight was brewing at Eastside High School. The plane moved into position and conducted surveillance above the campus. No fight occurred.

It has become common for law enforcement agencies to use aerial surveillance, including streaming video, during breaking crime situations. Some are even beginning to use drones for police work.

But Lancaster appears to be the first city where a camera will send video continuously to the ground, to be used as an integral part of daily policing.

For years, Lancaster officials have been exploring better ways to patrol the far-flung city. Mayor R. Rex Parris said he talked about various ideas, including drones, with aviation pioneer Dick Rutan and eventually settled on the concept the city is now putting into operation.

The city spent $1.3 million on the initial contract with Aero View, the Lancaster-based company that developed the program and will operate the planes. Beginning in a year, the city will pay about $90,000 a month for the service. Eventually, Parris said he hoped to add a second plane for greater coverage, and Aero View President Steve McCarter said the technology could be expanded to feed the video footage directly to deputies' patrol cars.

"This will allow us within five seconds of a call to get some eyes on location. If some robber is fleeing deputies, we get to learn where, thanks to this technology," Parris said. "In law enforcement, for a long time it has been known that it is a deterrent if a criminal believes there is a strong likelihood of apprehension."

When the plane is in the air, it will record every incident deputies respond to, Sheriff's Capt. Robert Jonsen said.

The plane's pilot, an Aero View employee, does not see the encrypted video feed. A watch deputy in the dispatch center guides the camera, and images can be viewed only with a special access code.

"We are very aware of privacy issues," Jonsen said, adding the videos will be stored for two years. "The protocol requires that the system be only used to monitor criminal activity."

Despite officials' assurances, the American Civil Liberties Union requested detailed records on the program last November, when the city approved the contract. Peter Bibring, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, said the organization had reviewed sample footage, which allayed some of their fears, but not all.

"As far as we can tell, the system isn't capable of seeing in any greater detail than your average pilot or helicopter pilot," Bibring said.

Had the system been capable of facial recognition, it would have presented more serious apprehension, he said. But Bibring said the ACLU was still concerned about infrared sensors and the potential to monitor and store data on people who are not suspected of a crime.

-- Abby Sewell and Richard Winton

The police are mostly trained on how to use physical force & violence

At the Chandler-Gilbert Community College wanna be cops have to take 139 hours of instruction on guns and fighting compared to a 44 hours of instruction on criminal law.

Obama lied about bin Laden's murder???

Source

SEAL book raises questions about bin Laden's death

Aug. 29, 2012 09:14 AM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- A firsthand account of the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden contradicts previous accounts by administration officials, raising questions as to whether the terror mastermind presented a clear threat when SEALs first fired upon him.

Bin Laden apparently was shot in the head when he looked out of his bedroom door into the top-floor hallway of his compound as SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell in his direction, according to former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen in "No Easy Day." The book is to be published next week by Penguin Group (USA)'s Dutton imprint.

Bissonnette says he was directly behind a point man going up the stairs in the pitch black hallway. Near the top, he said, he heard two shots, but the book doesn't make it clear who fired them. He wrote that the point man had seen a man peeking out of a door on the right side of the hallway.

The author writes that the man ducked back into his bedroom and the SEALs followed, only to find the man crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body. Once they wiped the blood off his face, they were certain it was bin Laden.

Bissonnette says the point man pulled the two women out of the way and shoved them into a corner. He and the other SEALs trained their guns' laser sights on bin Laden's still-twitching body, shooting him several times until he lay motionless. The SEALs later found two weapons stored by the doorway, untouched, the author said.

Administration officials briefing reporters in the days after the May 2011 raid in Pakistan said the SEALs shot bin Laden only after he ducked back into the bedroom because they assumed he might be reaching for a weapon.

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor would not comment on the apparent contradiction late Tuesday. But he said in an email Wednesday, "As President Obama said on the night that justice was brought to Osama bin Laden, 'We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country.'"

"No Easy Day" was due out Sept. 11, but Dutton announced the book would be available a week early, Sept. 4, because of a surge of orders due to advance publicity that drove the book to the top of the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com best-seller lists.

The Associated Press purchased a copy of the book Tuesday.

The account is sure to renew questions about whether the raid was intended to capture or simply to kill bin Laden. Bissonnette writes that during a pre-raid briefing, an administration lawyer told them that they were not on an assassination mission. According to Bissonnette, the lawyer said that if bin Laden was "naked with his hands up," they should not engage him. If bin Laden did not pose a threat, they should detain him.

A former deputy judge advocate general for the Air Force said the shooting was understandable according to the orders the SEALS had.

"It wasn't unreasonable for the SEALs to shoot the individual who stuck his head out," said the former JAG, ret. Maj. Gen. Charlie Dunlap, who now teaches at Duke University law school.

"In a confined space like that where it is clear that there are hostiles, the SEALs need to take reasonable steps to ensure their safety and accomplish the mission," Dunlap said.

Dunlap adds that shooting bin Laden's fallen form was also reasonable in his legal opinion, to keep the terrorist from possibly blowing himself up or getting a weapon and shooting at the SEALs.

In another possibly uncomfortable revelation for U.S. officials who say bin Laden's body was treated with dignity before being given a full Muslim burial at sea, the author reveals that in the cramped helicopter flight out of the compound, one of the SEALs was sitting on bin Laden's chest as the body lay at the author's feet in the middle of the cabin, for the short flight to a refueling stop inside Pakistan where a third helicopter was waiting.

This is common practice, as U.S. troops sometimes must sit on their own war dead in packed helicopters. Space was cramped because one of the helicopters had crashed in the initial assault, leaving little space for the roughly two dozen commandos in the two aircraft that remained. When the commandos reached the third aircraft, bin Laden's body was moved to it.

Bissonnette writes that none of the SEALs were fans of President Barack Obama and knew that his administration would take credit for ordering the raid. One of the SEALs said after the mission that they had just gotten Obama re-elected by carrying out the raid.

But he says they respected him as commander in chief and for giving the operation the go-ahead.

Bissonnette writes less flatteringly of meeting Vice President Joe Biden along with Obama at the headquarters of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment after the raid. He says Biden told "lame jokes" no one understood, reminding him of "someone's drunken uncle at Christmas dinner."

Beyond such embarrassing observations, U.S. officials fear the book may include classified information, as it did not undergo the formal review required by the Pentagon for works published by former or current Defense Department employees.

Officials from the Pentagon and the CIA, which commanded the mission, are examining the manuscript for possible disclosure of classified information and could take legal action against the author.

In a statement provided to the AP, the author says he did "not disclose confidential or sensitive information that would compromise national security in any way."

Bissonnette's real name was first revealed by Fox News and confirmed to the AP.

Jihadists on al-Qaida websites have posted purported photos of the author, calling for his murder.

U.S. workers shot in Mexico may be CIA employees

Well at least when the CIA isn't smuggling cocaine or other drugs to finance the clandestine overthrow of governments our American rulers don't like.

Source

U.S. workers shot in Mexico may be CIA employees

By William Booth and Greg Miller, Published: August 28

TRES MARIAS, MEXICO — Mexican President Felipe Calderon apologized to the United States on Tuesday for an attack last week in which two U.S. government workers were wounded when Mexican federal police fired multiple rounds at their armored U.S. Embassy vehicle.

Speaking at a forum on Mexico’s security situation, Calderon turned to U.S. Ambassador E. Anthony Wayne and promised that the Mexican attorney general would get to the bottom of the case. Calderon also suggested that 12 federal police officers arrested Monday for alleged involvement in the shooting might have ties to criminal organizations.

Calderon’s comments coincided with new indications that the wounded U.S. officials were CIA employees. The agency link was first reported in the Mexican media. U.S. public records suggest that the name reportedly used by one of the shooting victims was a CIA cover identity associated with a post office box in Dunn Loring, Va. The agency declined to comment.

Calderon also did not address those reports Tuesday.

The CIA has expanded its presence in Mexico significantly in recent years as part of a broader U.S. effort to assist the Mexican government’s crackdown on drug cartels. Former senior CIA officials said the agency has shared intelligence with Mexico and helped its elite counter-narcotics teams root out corruption and identify officers with ties to drug lords.

But the former officials said the CIA has been frustrated by delays that can last months before Mexican authorities mount operations based on U.S.-provided intelligence and acknowledged that lingering mistrust makes the agency reluctant to share its most sensitive information even with vetted Mexican units.

Top Mexican officials have long denied or played down links between the CIA and their military.

The two U.S. employees and a Mexican navy captain serving as an interpreter were heading Friday to a navy training camp south of Mexico City when, the U.S. Embassy says, they were ambushed.

One of the wounded men was attached to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and the other appeared to be in Mexico on temporary assignment, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is under investigation.

Officials with the FBI, the Pentagon and the Drug Enforcement Administration have said that the men were not employees of their agencies. The State Department also has declined to comment on whether the men were agency employees.

But an examination of public records suggests that the name used by one of the men may be fictitious, with similarities to others created by the CIA to provide cover for its officers overseas.

Shortly after the shooting, major Mexican news organizations identified one of the U.S. officials as Stan D. Boss, a name associated with a post office box at a Dunn Loring mail facility tied to at least one previous CIA cover identity that was publicly exposed. Records indicate that Boss was issued a Social Security number in Texas in 2004. Beyond that, the records are largely blank, with not even a date of birth associated with the name.

That same Dunn Loring post office is linked to dozens of other names that have similarly scant records and to Social Security numbers issued around the same time. Among the previous holders of post office boxes at that location was an individual named Philip P. Quincannon, who apparently does not exist but who was listed as an officer with at least two aviation companies suspected of involvement in CIA rendition flights after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Within hours of the attack Friday, Mexican media were publishing two names that they said belonged to the victims. Mexican media outlets first mentioned a CIA connection to the case Tuesday morning.

The Mexican news media reported, and U.S. law enforcement officials later confirmed, that the Americans came under attack by Mexican federal police officers who were dressed in civilian clothes and driving civilian vehicles.

According to the accounts, the Americans were driving the embassy armored car when they were confronted at a checkpoint by a carload of Mexican federal police officers. The Americans, threatened by what appeared to be civilians brandishing military weapons, quickly fled the scene.

Soon after, a total of four vehicles, all civilian and all containing Mexican federal police personnel, got into a high-speed chase, shooting at the fleeing Americans, according to the accounts.

The Americans sped down a winding, potholed mountain road, past pastures and small farms. An officer in the Mexican army on patrol in the hills said the area was not a hot spot for drug cartels but was beset by small-time thugs who kidnapped victims and stole their phones and credit cards. The victims were often left tied to trees.

The Americans were eventually surrounded and the federal police fired multiple rounds at their vehicle, close enough to see who was inside, according to an account in the newspaper La Jornada.

Some Mexican law enforcement officials have said that the confrontation was caused by confusion — that the federal police were in the area chasing kidnappers who had seized the head of the National Anthropology Museum.

A spokeswoman for the museum said it had no reports indicating that anyone from the institute had been kidnapped.

Miller reported from Washington. Julie Tate in Washington and Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Account Says Navy Author Wrote Book After a Slight

Source

Account Says Navy Author Wrote Book After a Slight

By JAMES DAO

Published: September 2, 2012

The former Navy SEALs member who is a co-author of a first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was willing to break “the code of silence” honored by many commandos because of “bad blood” with his former unit, the elite SEAL Team 6, according to a new e-book written by other Special Operations veterans.

The e-book says the author, Matt Bissonnette, who wrote the book “No Easy Day” under the pseudonym Mark Owen, was effectively pushed out of SEAL Team 6 after he expressed interest last year in leaving the Navy and starting a business. Upset at how he had been treated, Mr. Bissonnette felt less compunction about writing a book that he knew might upset colleagues, the e-book authors say.

“How was he repaid for his honesty and 14 years of service?” a passage of the e-book asks. “He was ostracized from his unit with no notice and handed a plane ticket back to Virginia from a training operation.”

The e-book, “No Easy Op,” is scheduled to go on sale on Amazon on Monday, a day before Mr. Bissonnette’s book hits the market. The Pentagon has threatened legal action against Mr. Bissonnette because he did not submit the manuscript for review early enough in the publication process.

The e-book offers a few details of its own about Mr. Bissonnette’s team, none of which could be independently corroborated. It says, for instance, that team members loudly celebrated their successful mission at a bar in Virginia Beach, causing them to be reprimanded.

“No Easy Op” is a product of sofrep.com, a Web site produced by former commandos and devoted to the news, culture and weaponry of Special Operations forces. Brandon Webb, a former SEALs sniper and the founder of the site, said the e-book was based on conversations that he and his co-authors had with current members of SEAL Team 6, none of whom are identified.

He declined to say whether Mr. Bissonnette provided information for the e-book, though he said he talked with Mr. Bissonnette over the past year about what it was like to write a book about the SEALs.

Mr. Webb is the author of a book about his own military experience, “The Red Circle.” He also did not submit his manuscript for review, but was not punished because, he said, the book came out years after the missions it described and contained details that had already been made public.

“No Easy Day” and “No Easy Op” are just the latest manifestations of the nation’s continuing fascination with commando culture. A Hollywood action film released this year, “Act of Valor,” employed active-duty SEAL members to portray themselves.

In a statement, Kevin Maurer, a journalist and co-author of “No Easy Day,” said: “After spending several very intense months working with Mark Owen on this book, I know that he wrote this book solely to share a story about the incredible men and women defending America all over the world. Any suggestion otherwise is as ill informed as it is inaccurate. What’s more, Mark has an unshakable respect for the U.S. military, in particular the men he served with. That’s why not one negative word was written about anyone he served with.”

The e-book is in many ways sympathetic to Mr. Bissonnette, calling him “an operator’s operator.” The authors also say it is highly unlikely that Mr. Bissonnette released any vital information about SEAL tactics and procedures.

But the e-book chides Mr. Bissonnette for not submitting the book for review, saying he could have eased concerns about security leaks. Mr. Bissonnette’s real identity was disclosed last week.

A significant portion of the e-book is devoted to describing the differences between SEAL members and other Special Operations forces. Army units like the Special Forces, the Rangers and the Delta Force, considered the equivalent of SEAL Team 6, are far more tight-lipped than the SEALs, the authors say.

In the infantry-bred world of Army Special Operations, the authors write, “No one wants to hear braggarts telling tall tales of their heroics,” while “a culture of boasting and arrogance continues to haunt the SEALs.”

But that may change, the authors speculate. “No Easy Day,” they say, “will result in blowback that will drive policy change across the entire Special Operations community regarding operators’ ability to write books in the future. Hollywood and media access will be virtually impossible for the foreseeable future.”

Mitt Romney is a Chickenhawk!!!!!

Just why didn't Romney enlist if he backed war?

Sept. 4, 2012 12:00 AM

A Republican video showed a young Mitt Romney carrying signs supporting the Vietnam War, making him some sort of a super-patriot, I guess.

The video made a point of mentioning that Mitt evaded service lawfully by drawing a high draft number, without mentioning that there was always the option of enlisting, particularly for super-patriots like Mitt. Since Mitt strongly supported the Vietnam War, but thought that someone else should do the fighting, this would make him a chickenhawk, as Vietnam veterans define the word. No wonder Mitt is so popular with the Republican Party.

I have no problem with someone who opposed the war in a stand-up manner and attempted to avoid the draft. But I have no respect for someone like Mitt who supported the war but showed the white feather himself when it came time to stand up.

-- Neil Thex, Mesa

Tutu says Bush should be jailed for war crimes

Tutu calls for George Bush to be tried at the ICC in the Hague

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu called Sunday for George Bush (and Tony Blair) to “face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for their role in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.” They should be made to "answer for their actions”, he wrote.

The International Criminal Court (commonly referred to as the ICC or ICCt) is a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

Referring to the war in Iraq, Tutu said: "The then-leaders of the U.S. and U.K. fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand - with the specter of Syria and Iran before us," said Tutu.

The Iraq War was a conflict triggered by an invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom from March 20, 2003 to December 18, 2011, though sectarian violence continues and has caused tens of thousands of fatalities.

In 2004 then, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has told the BBC the US-led invasion of Iraq was “an illegal act that contravened the UN charter”.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu (born 7 October 1931) is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid.

Tutu has been active in the defense of human rights for most of his adult life.

Tutu is recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984; the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism in 1986; the Pacem in Terris Award in 1987; the Sydney Peace Prize in 1999; the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2005 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Tutu is a man of impeccable moral character.

For him to say such things is a big deal.

Source

Tutu: Bush y Blair deberían ser juzgados por Irak

Por DAVID STRINGER 09/02/2012

LONDRES - El premio Nobel de Paz Desmond Tutu pidió el domingo el enjuiciamiento del ex primer ministro británico Tony Blair y del ex presidente estadounidense George W. Bush en La Haya por su papel en la invasión de Irak en 2003.

Tutu, ex arzobispo de la Iglesia Anglicana de Sudáfrica, escribió en un artículo editorial en el periódico The Observer que los ex líderes de Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos deberían "responder por sus acciones".

La guerra en Irak "ha desestabilizado y polarizado el mundo en mayor medida que ningún otro conflicto en la historia", escribió Tutu, laureado con el Nobel en 1984. "Los responsables por esos sufrimientos y pérdidas de vidas deberían seguir el mismo camino que algunos de sus pares africanos y asiáticos, que han sido obligados a responder en La Haya por sus acciones", añadió.

El tribunal de La Haya es el primero que juzga crímenes de guerra desde hace 10 años. Hasta ahora sólo ha tomado casos de Africa, como Sudán, Congo, Libia y Costa de Marfil.

Tutu ha criticado desde hace tiempo la guerra de Irak. Otros que se han opuesto al conflicto _entre ellos el dramaturgo Harold Pinter_ pidieron anteriormente que Bush y Blair comparezcan en La Haya.

"Los entonces líderes de Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña prepararon el terreno para comportarse como matones de una escuela, dividiéndonos aún más. Nos han puesto al borde de un precipicio en el que nos encontramos ahora, con el espectro de Siria e Irán ante nosotros", dijo Tutu, que la semana pasada se retiró de una conferencia en Sudáfrica debido a la presencia de Blair.

Aunque el Tribunal Penal Internacional puede tratar casos de genocidio, crímenes de guerra y crímenes contra la humanidad, carece de la jurisdicción para juzgar crímenes de agresión. Cualquier posible encausamiento por la guerra de Irak correspondería a la categoría de agresión.

Estados Unidos es una de las naciones que no reconoce al Tribunal Penal Internacional.

En respuesta a Tutu, Blair dijo que tiene un enorme respeto por la tarea del purpurado en la lucha contra la segregación racial en Sudáfrica, pero le acusó de repetir críticas imprecisas sobre la guerra de Irak.

"Mencionar la vieja cantinela de que mentimos sobre las labores de espionaje es algo completamente erróneo como han demostrado todos los análisis independientes de las pruebas", dijo Blair.

"Y mencionar como irrelevante el hecho de que (el depuesto presidente iraquí) Saddam (Hussein) mató a centenares de miles de sus ciudadanos a la necesidad de sacarlo del poder, es algo extraño". Empero, Blair reconoció que en las "democracias sanas la gente puede concordar o no".

Will Obama bomb Iran to get reelected???

Source

Israelis huddling with U.S. over Iran

Moves suggest imminent attack less likely

by Josef Federman - Sept. 4, 2012 11:03 PM

Associated Press

JERUSALEM - Israeli officials said Tuesday they are in close discussions with the United States over how to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, seeking to ease tensions that have emerged between the two allies over a possible Israeli military strike against Iran.

The dialogue, in which Israel is looking for President Barack Obama to take a tough public position against Iran, suggests the odds of an Israeli attack in the near term have been reduced.

Israel, convinced that Iran isn't taking seriously U.S. vows to block it from acquiring nuclear weapons, believes that time to stop the Iranians is quickly running out. A series of warnings by Israeli officials in recent weeks has raised concerns that Israel could soon stage a unilateral military strike. In response, senior American officials have made clear they oppose any Israeli military action at the current time.

After tense exchanges with the Americans, Israeli political and defense officials said Tuesday that the sides are now working closely together in hopes of getting their positions in sync.

Clearer American assurances on what pressure it is prepared to use against Iran, including possible military action, would reduce the need for Israel to act alone, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a security matter.

There was no immediate American comment Tuesday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu huddled with his security cabinet for a daylong briefing by military intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.

Netanyahu has criticized the international community for failing to curb Iran's nuclear program. In recent days, he has called for the world to set a clear "red line" for the Iranians. His comments were seen as veiled criticism of President Barack Obama.

Israel has not publicly defined its own red lines, which might include a deadline for Iran to open its facilities to U.N. inspectors or a determination that Iran has definitively begun enriching uranium to a weapons-grade level.

Israel believes Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, a charge the Iranians deny. The U.S. has said it doesn't know what Iran's ultimate plans are for its nuclear program.

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Sunday played down any differences, saying "there is absolutely no daylight between the United States and Israel when it comes to the necessity of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon."

"The best way to ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon is through a diplomatic process that results in Iran finally agreeing to, in a completely verifiable way, give up its nuclear weapons ambitions and abide by its international obligations. But that window will not remain open indefinitely," Carney said.

He emphasized that Obama "has insisted that all options ... remain on the table."

A U.N. report last week showing continued progress in the Iranian nuclear program reinforced the Israeli view that negotiations and economic sanctions are not persuading Iran to change its behavior.

The U.N. report found that Iran has moved more of its uranium enrichment activities into fortified bunkers deep underground and impervious to air attack. Enrichment is a key activity in building a bomb, though it has other uses as well.

Israel views a nuclear-armed Iran as a mortal threat, citing Iranian calls for Israel's destruction, Iran's development of missiles capable of striking the Jewish state, and Iranian support for hostile Arab militant groups.

Israel's timeline for military action is shorter than that of the United States, which has far more powerful bunker-busting bombs at its disposal.

Feeling so vulnerable, Israel needs strong assurances from its key ally, said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and confidant of Netanyahu.

"We have to hear something a lot more concrete, a lot more public from the U.S., which is the leader of free world. What is it going to do?" Gold told the Army Radio station.

Israeli officials said they are discussing the possibility of tightened economic sanctions on Iran. They also want Obama to make a strong public statement of American unwillingness to tolerate a nuclear Iran, perhaps at the U.N. General Assembly later this month or even sooner.

"What we'd like to see is President Obama saying something in the next few days or weeks, something serious," said one official.

"It could be (a declaration) of red lines, or some forceful statement," he said.

"The point is not to convince Israel, but to convince the Iranians, that we, the United States, mean business. We will tighten sanctions. There's a military option. ... The Iranians have to understand unequivocally that the Americans are serious about preventing them from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Obama has repeatedly said he would not allow Iran to gain nuclear weapons and has said the U.S. would be prepared to use force as a last resort.

But many Israelis are skeptical. Obama is also believed to be unwilling to launch a risky military operation in the run-up to presidential elections. An attack could send global oil prices skyrocketing and endanger U.S. troops in the region.

The Israel Hayom newspaper, widely considered to be a mouthpiece for the Netanyahu government, wrote in an analysis Tuesday that Obama "does not believe in a military strike on Iran."

"Obama could have long ago resolved the entire matter in the simplest fashion: Had he posed the Iranians with an ultimatum, even for a date after Nov. 6 (U.S. presidential elections), he would have allayed Israel's concerns, he would have shown the Iranians that he was resolute," commentator Boaz Bismuth wrote. "But Obama has not done that for now, not because he can't, but simply because he doesn't want to."

Israel Hayom is a free tabloid financed by American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a friend of Netanyahu's and a major donor to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's campaign.

Strains between Washington and Israel have been exceptionally apparent in recent weeks, with the top U.S. military official, Gen. Martin Dempsey, twice speaking out against a go-it-alone strike.

Last week he said he would "not want to be complicit" in such an assault.

At the same time, many in Israel suspect Israel's leaders are bluffing in order to compel the world to get serious about the issue. An array of retired military officials have said Israel should not act on its own, reasoning that it can depend on Washington to act if necessary. Also, they warn of a harsh response by Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza in the event of an Israeli strike.

L.A. can't randomly seize possessions of homeless, court rules

L.A. can't randomly seize possessions of homeless, court rules

September 5, 2012 | 11:15 am

Los Angeles and other cities are barred by the U.S. Constitution from randomly seizing and destroying property the homeless temporarily leave unattended on city streets, a federal appeals court decided Wednesday.

Upholding a court order against Los Angeles, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the personal possessions the homeless leave for a short time on city sidewalks may be taken only if the possessions pose an immediate threat to public safety or health or involve criminal evidence.

Even then, the court said, the city may not summarily destroy the property and must notify the owners where they can pick it up.

The ruling stemmed from a court fight over a Los Angeles city ordinance aimed at cleaning up the city’s skid row. The city last year posted notices on the streets warning homeless people that their possessions had to be removed during street-cleaning days. City workers, accompanied by police, then seized and destroyed property they found unattended.

Homeless individuals sought and obtained a court order to stop the seizures, and the city appealed.

In ruling against Los Angeles, the 9th Circuit said violating a city ordinance does not strip a person of his or her 4th Amendment right against unlawful seizure of property.

“Were it otherwise, the government could seize and destroy any illegally parked car or unlawfully unattended dog,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote for the majority.

A dissenting judge argued that the homeless had been given adequate warning to remove their possessions and were provided with a warehouse for storing them.

“Common sense and societal expectations suggest that when people leave their personal items unattended in a public place, they understand that they run the risk of their belongings being searched, seized, disturbed, stolen or thrown away,” wrote Judge Consuelo M. Callahan, appointed by former President George W. Bush.

Human Rights Watch: Evidence of wider U.S. waterboarding use

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Human Rights Watch: Evidence of wider U.S. waterboarding use

By Sarah El Deeb, Associated Press

CAIRO – Human Rights Watch said it has uncovered evidence of a wider use of waterboarding in American interrogations of detainees than has been acknowledged by the United States, in a report Thursday that details further brutal treatment at secret CIA-run prisons under the Bush administration-era U.S. program of detention and rendition of terror suspects.

The report also paints a more complete picture of Washington's close cooperation with the regime of Libya's former dictator Moammar Gadhafi in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. handed over to Libya the Islamist opponents of Gadhafi that it detained abroad with only thin "diplomatic assurances" that they would not be mistreated, and several of them were subsequently tortured in prison, Human Rights Watch said.

The 154-page report features interviews by the New York-based group with 14 Libyan dissident exiles. They describe systematic abuses while they were held in U.S.-led detention centers in Afghanistan — some as long as two years — or in U.S.-led interrogations in Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand, Sudan and elsewhere before the Americans handed them over to Libya.

"Not only did the U.S. deliver (Gadhafi) his enemies on a silver platter, but it seems the CIA tortured many of them first, said Laura Pitter, counterterrorism adviser at Human Rights Watch and author of the report.

"The scope of the Bush administration abuse appears far broader than previously acknowledged," she said.

The report comes days after the Justice Department announced it would not bring criminal charges against any CIA personnel over severe interrogation methods used in the detention and rendition program. Investigators said they could not prove any interrogators went beyond guidelines authorized by the Bush administration. Rights activists and some Obama administration officials say even the authorized techniques constituted torture, though the CIA and Bush administration argue they do not.

Any new instances of waterboarding, however, would go beyond the three that the CIA has said were authorized.

Former President George W. Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA have said that the method was used on only three senior al-Qaeda suspects at secret CIA black sites in Thailand and Poland — Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Aby Zubayda and Abd al-Rahman al-Nashiri, all currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The technique involves pouring water on a hooded detainee's nose and mouth until he feels he is drowning.

The 14 Libyans interviewed by Human Rights Watch were swept up in the American hunt for Islamic militants and al-Qaeda figures around the world after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They were mostly members of the anti-Gadhafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who fled in the 1980s and 1990s to Pakistan, Afghanistan and African countries. The group ran training camps in Afghanistan at the same time al-Qaeda was based there but it largely shunned Osama bin Laden and his campaign against the United States, focusing instead on fighting Gadhafi.

Ironically, the U.S. turned around and helped the Libyan opposition overthrow Gadhafi in 2011. Now several of the 14 former detainees hold positions in the new Libyan government.

The accounts of new uses of simulated drowning came from two former detainees, Mohammed al-Shoroeiya and Khaled al-Sharif, who also described a gamut of abuses they went through. The two were seized in Pakistan in April 2003 and taken to U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, where al-Shoroeiya was held for 16 months and al-Sharif for two years before they were handed over to Libya.

In Afghanistan, they were shackled in cells for months in variety of positions, often naked in almost total darkness with music blaring continuously, left to defecate and urinate on themselves. For example, al-Sharif spent three weeks seated on the ground in his cell with his ankles and wrists chained to a ring in the wall, forcing him to keep his arms and legs elevated. He said he was taken out of his shackles once a day for a half-hour to eat.

For the first three months, they were not allowed to bathe. "We looked like monsters," al-Shoroeiya said.

Al-Shoroeiya described being locked naked for a day and a half in a tall, narrow, half-meter-wide (1 1/2-foot-wide) chamber with his hands chained above his head, with no food as Western music blasted loudly from speakers next to his ears the entire time.

At another point, he was stuffed into a 1 meter by 1 meter (3 foot by 3 foot) box resembling a footlocker and kept there for more than an hour as interrogators prodded him with long, thin objects through holes in the side of the box.

Both he and Sharif said they were repeatedly taken to a room where they were slammed against a wooden wall and punched in the abdomen.

Al-Shoroeiya said one female American interrogator told him, "Now you are under the custody of the United States of America. In this place there will be no human rights. Since September 11, we have forgotten about something called human rights," according to the report.

Al-Shoroeiya described being waterboarded, though he did not use the term. He said he was put in a hood and strapped upside down on a wooden board. Freezing water was poured over his nose and mouth until he felt he was suffocating. During several half-hour interrogation sessions, they would waterboard him multiple times, asking him questions in between while a doctor monitored his body temperature.

"They wouldn't stop until they got some sort of answer from me," he told HRW.

Al-Sharif described a similar technique. Instead of being strapped to a board, he was put on a plastic sheet with guards holding up the edges, while freezing water was poured over him, including onto his hooded face directly over his mouth and nose.

"I felt as if I were suffocating," he told HRW. "I spent three months getting interrogated heavily … and they gave me a different kind of torture every day. Sometimes they used water, sometimes not."

Asked about the new accounts, CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the agency "has been on the record that there are three substantiated cases" of the use of waterboarding.

She said she could not comment on the specific allegations but noted the Justice Department's decision not to prosecute after it "exhaustively reviewed the treatment of more than 100 detainees in the post-9/11 period — including allegations involving unauthorized interrogation techniques."

The Obama administration has ordered a halt to waterboarding and many of the severe techniques authorized by its predecessors.

Others of the 14 former detainees in the Human Rights Watch described similar conditions as al-Shoroeiya and al-Sharif, particularly three held in the same U.S.-led prisons in Afghanistan.

One of them, Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi, said he nearly went insane in isolation after months being shackled naked in dark, freezing cells with music blaring, pounding his head against the wall and screaming, "I want to die, why don't you just kill me?"

Another, detained in Mauretania, said that during interrogations by a foreigner he believed was American, his wife was brought to the detention center; his captors showed him his wife through a peephole and threatened to rape her if he did not cooperate.

Human Rights Watch said the U.S. failed in its post-9/11 campaign to distinguish between Islamists targeting the United States and those who "may simply have been engaged in armed opposition against their own repressive regimes.

"This failure risked aligning the United States with brutal dictators," the report said.

Eight of those interviewed were handed over to Libya in 2004 — the same year then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a public rapprochement with Gadhafi and Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell signed a major exploration deal off the Libyan coast, the HRW report noted. The remaining six were transferred to Libya over the two following years.

All were jailed by Gadhafi's regime, most of them freed only after his fall. Most said they were not physically tortured — perhaps a result of Gadhafi's attempts to mend fences with the West — but were kept in solitary confinement for long periods. Several, however, told HRW they were beaten and tortured, including being given electrical shocks.

The report also calls into question Libyan claims that one figure handed over by the Americans, Ibn el-Sheikh al-Libi, committed suicide in a Libyan prison. Al-Libi was held in U.S. secret prisons for years after 2001 and gave information under torture by the Egyptians that the Bush administration used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq but was later discredited. After his handover, Libyan authorities said he hanged himself in his cell. But HRW researchers said they were shown photos of his body that showed signs of torture.

Messages to Libya from the CIA and British intelligence among the Tripoli Documents published by HRW indicated the United States and Britain were eager to help Libya obtain several senior LIFG figures, including its co-founders, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi.

Belhaj and his then-pregnant wife were detained by Malaysia with the help of British intelligence and then handed over to the CIA in Thailand, where he told HRW he was stripped and beaten. They were then taken to Libya, where Belhaj was imprisoned.

After Belhaj arrived in Libya, a message believed to be from the then-head of counterterrorism at British intelligence congratulates the Libyan intelligence chief. Britain's help "was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built," he wrote.

————

AP reporter Adam Goldman in Washington contributed to this report.

Police chiefs urge limits on use of drone aircraft

After all police departments are into "empire building" and they will use any excuse or reason to increase the size of their budget and the number of employees that work for them.

I wouldn't doubt if in a longer period of time the cops start asking to use drone air strikes to kill suspected criminals and destroy suspected locations used by alleged criminals. They are currently used for this in Iraq, Afghanistan and other third world countries in which the DEA and American military operate in.

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Police chiefs urge limits on use of drone aircraft

Want them to be unarmed, suggest warrants for surveillance

by Kevin Johnson - Sept. 6, 2012 11:02 PM

USA Today

The nation's largest consortium of police officials is calling for the limited use of unmanned drones in local law enforcement operations and urging that the controversial aircraft -- now popular weapons on international battlefields -- not be armed.

The first national advisory for the use of unmanned aircraft issued by the International Association of Chiefs of Police comes as federal lawmakers and civil rights advocates have expressed deep concerns about the vehicles' use in domestic law enforcement, especially in aerial surveillance.

Only a handful of police agencies, including the Mesa County, Colo., Sheriff's Department, are currently using unmanned aircraft. But Don Roby, chairman of the IACP's aviation committee, said an increasing number of departments are considering unmanned aircraft for such things as search and rescue operations, traffic accident scene mapping and some surveillance activities.

"It's very important that people understand that we won't be up there with armed predator drones firing away," said Roby, a Baltimore Police Department captain. "Every time you hear someone talking about the use of these vehicles, it's always in the context of a military operation. That's not what we're talking about."

In cases in which a drone is to be used to collect evidence that would likely "intrude upon reasonable expectations of privacy," the IACP's new guidelines recommend that police secure search warrants before launching the vehicle.

On the question of arming drones, however, the IACP issued its most emphatic recommendation: "Equipping the aircraft with weapons of any type is strongly discouraged. Given the current state of the technology, the ability to effectively deploy weapons from a small (unmanned aircraft) is doubtful ... (and) public acceptance of airborne use of force is likewise doubtful and could result in unnecessary community resistance to the program." ACLU urges privacy laws

The American Civil Liberties Union applauded the police group for "issuing recommendations that are quite strong in some areas."

"At the same time, we don't think these recommendations go far enough to ensure true protection of privacy from drones," the ACLU said, adding that privacy protections needed to be enshrined in law, "not merely promulgated by the police themselves."

Some proposed legislation, including a bill proposed by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for authorities to secure warrants before all uses, except in cases when the aircraft is being used to patrol the borders, when there is a threat of terror attack or in cases when life is threatened

Memos show U.S. hushed up Soviet crime

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Memos show U.S. hushed up Soviet crime

Thousands of Poles were executed to eliminate resistance to Soviet control

by Vanessa Gera - Sept. 10, 2012 11:03 PM

Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland - The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington in 1945 with news of a Soviet atrocity: Two years earlier they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe.

The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

Documents released Monday lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940. Newly declassified

The evidence is among 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives released and is putting online. Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who helped lead a recent push for the release of the documents, called the effort's success Monday a "momentous occasion" in an attempt to "make history whole."

The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of the secret codes sent by the two American POWs -- something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on.

The declassified documents also show the United States maintaining that it couldn't conclusively determine guilt until a Russian admission in 1990 -- a statement that looks improbable given the huge body of evidence of Soviet guilt that had already emerged decades earlier. Historians say the new material helps to flesh out the story of what the U.S. knew and when.

Executed

The Soviet secret police killed the 22,000 Poles with shots to the back of the head. Their aim was to eliminate a military and intellectual elite that would have put up stiff resistance to Soviet control. The men were among Poland's most accomplished -- officers and reserve officers who in their civilian lives worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or as other professionals. Their loss has proven an enduring wound to the Polish nation.

In the early years after the war, outrage by some American officials over the concealment inspired the creation of a special U.S. Congressional committee to investigate Katyn.

In a final report released in 1952, the committee declared there was no doubt of Soviet guilt, and called the massacre "one of the most barbarous international crimes in world history." It found that Roosevelt's administration suppressed public knowledge of the crime, but said it was out of military necessity. It also recommended the government bring charges against the Soviets at an international tribunal -- something never acted upon.

Despite the committee's strong conclusions, the White House maintained its silence on Katyn for decades, showing an unwillingness to focus on an issue that would have added to political tensions with the Soviets during the Cold War.

A late confession

It wasn't until the waning days of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe that reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev publicly admitted to Soviet guilt at Katyn, a key step in Polish-Russian reconciliation.

The silence by the U.S. government has been a source of deep frustration for many Polish-Americans.

One is Franciszek Herzog, 81, a Connecticut man whose father and uncle died in the massacre.

After Gorbachev's 1990 admission, he was hoping for more openness from the U.S. as well and made three attempts to obtain an apology from President George H.W. Bush.

"It will not resurrect the men," he wrote to Bush. "But will give moral satisfaction to the widows and orphans of the victims."

"There's a big difference between not knowing and not wanting to know," Herzog said. "I believe the U.S. government didn't want to know because it was inconvenient to them."

More on this topic

Key dates

September 1939: World War II begins with the German invasion of Poland from the west, quickly followed by the Soviet invasion from the east. The carving up of Poland results from a secret pact between Adolf Hitler's Germany and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. The Soviets soon capture thousands of Polish officers and transport them to POW camps in Russia. They also deport hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians to Siberia.

April-May 1940: Soviet secret police kill 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war and dump their bodies in mass graves.

1941: Germany attacks Soviet Union. The Soviets join the Allies in the war against Hitler.

April 1943: Nazi Germany's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels announces the German discovery of mass graves at Katyn. Goebbels hopes public knowledge of the Soviet crime would sow distrust between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies and weaken their alliance.

May 1943: As part of the Nazi propaganda effort, the Germans bring a group of American and British POWs to Katyn to see the remains of the Poles in the mass graves.

May 1945: World War II ends. Upon being freed, Lt. Col John H. Van Vliet gives his first report to Army intelligence on what he witnessed at Katyn.

1951: The U.S. Congress sets up a committee to investigate the Katyn crimes.

1952: The Congressional committee concludes there is no question that the Soviets bear blame for the massacre.

1990: The reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admits that the Soviets bear guilt for Katyn.

Sept. 10, 2012: The U.S. National Archives releases about 1,000 pages of newly declassified records related to the Katyn massacre.